Many people learn foreign vocabulary best if they split the material into manageable chunks. Cerebware's 'Themes' menu provides a way to maintain a group of small vocabulary sub-lists that can be reviewed separately, even while they are pooled within the user's total vocabulary.
A Cerebware 'theme' is a short list of vocabulary items related to a single topic, such as 'Animals', 'Travel', or 'Irregular Verbs'. Some themes are provided with the basic version of the program, and extra pre-prepared themes are available to licenced users, but users can also make their own themes.
To create a new theme, type or copy a list of words with their English definitions, as explained in 'Creating vocab lists'. Save the results as a plain text file, with the suffix '.lst', placing the file within the appropriate Themes folder (SpanishThemes, GermanThemes, or whatever corresponds to your target language).
To import and use the theme, you will need to indicate to the Trainer that you want the words in your new list to be treated as a thematically linked group. The best way is to mark the first and last items of the list with a theme/grammar tag, which looks something like {|| Animals}, for the first item and {||END} for the last item. For instance, an animals list might look like this:
der Hund : the dog {||Animals}
die Katze : the cat
der Adler : the eagle {||END}
(Note the curly braces {}, and the two uprights ||. The complete tag syntax is explained in List File Syntax.)
The advantage of this technique is that the tags, and hence the theme name, will stay with the items even if they are cut and pasted into another list. Also, multiple themes can be contained within a single text file, such as 'Basic Vocab.lst'.
You should also add the theme name to the Themes menu. Under the Themes menu, select 'Edit Theme Topics'. A text file named 'Theme Topics.txt' will open, which lists the available themes for your language, one theme per line, like this:
Animals
Travel
Irregular Verbs
Add any themes you like, including ones that you have not created yet, and save the file in its standard location (e.g. SpanishThemes\Theme Topics.txt'). The Themes menu will be updated immediately to contain the chosen themes. When you subsequently select one of these Themes in the menu, the program will first look to see if any of your current vocabulary items has a tag that matches the theme name, and then offer to import the theme if necessary; it will search your Themes folder for a file named X.lst, where X is the theme name. If necessary, the appropriate tags will be added to the first and last items as they are imported.
To use the theme, just select it in the Themes menu. A test session will begin which is limited to the theme you have chosen. To return to ordinary testing, stop the session and start a new session with the Test button. Note that the Test button always starts a standard test, regardless of whether your vocabulary has themes, and regardless of what you have previously selected in the Themes menu. In a standard test, the Trainer will ignore themes completely, and will choose test items based on what items are due for revision, and which new items appear next in the overall vocabulary list. You can switch between themed testing and standard testing according to your mood.
If you would like to see how your knowledge of each theme is progressing, choose 'Theme Progress' under the Themes menu. A list of your themes will appear, along with an indication of how many items are known. Themes that have not yet been imported, or for which there are no tags, will be marked with the comment 'No items tagged', like this:
THEME PROGRESS REPORT
Hola. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ( #254-312 ) 59/59 items
Language problems. . . (No items tagged) 0 items
Days and Months. . . . . ( #313-336 ) 24/24 items
Question Words. . . . . . ( #428-435 ) 8/8 items
The time. . . . . . . . . . . . (No items tagged) 0 items
This and that. . . . . . . (No items tagged) 0 items
Travel and transport (No items tagged) 0 items
Possessive Adjectives ( #247-253 ) 7/7 items
Common Spanish Words (No items tagged) 0 items
1001 Pitfalls Chapter 1 ( #337-369 ) 33/33 items
Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ( #398-427 ) 30/30 items
La Sombra 1. . . . . . . . . (No items tagged) 0 items
In general, list files intended to be used as themes should not be imported via the File menu unless they have explicit tags in the .lst file, because this bypasses the mechanisms intended to mark the new words as a theme.
To summarise, the simplest way to create a theme and use it is as follows:
1) Create a list
2) Save the file with a .lst suffix in the appropriate Themes folder
3) Open your vocab file
4) Add the topic to the Themes menu (choosing 'Edit Theme Topics')
5) Select the theme in the Themes menu to import it into your vocab and start the first themed test
6) To run the test again in future, re-select the theme in the Themes menu
Advanced users are also advised to tag the first and last items, like this:
1a) Create a list
1b) Add a {|| theme} tag to the first item
1c) Add an {||END} tag to the last item
But don't worry, the tags will be added automatically during step 5, if necessary. Tags can also be modified in the Advanced version of the Edit Window, so you can change the theme names later.
If you have any questions, or want to submit themes for others to use, contact Cerebware.