Vocabfish.com
by Stephen Kramer
(Philadelphia, PA, USA)
I recently stumbled across Vocabfish.com, a vocabulary flashcard website. Per the site's homepage, "Vocabfish offers vocabulary training exercise for over 2000 basic words in any pairing of English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese."
Vocabfish has two groups of languages - standard and premium. Access to standard languages (English, French and Spanish) is free. Access to premium languages (Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and German) requires a one-year subscription for a very reasonable $12/year.
Vocabfish provides a free 1-day trial to any premium language, so that users can test the tool out before making a purchase. The free 1-day trial does NOT require any credit card information. Simply register and have immediate free access.
Words are categorized by subject matter or grammar function - verbs, adjectives, animals, auto, business, food, home, hotel, clothing, professions, travel, weather, etc.
The flashcard is very simple and intuitive: 1) The source word appears, 2) the user guesses the target word, 3) the user clicks on the question mark for the correct answer, 4) the user determines if he/she guessed correctly and clicks on the green check for correct and on the red X for incorrect. If the user guessed incorrectly, the word is placed back "in the deck", so to speak. Statistics are dynamic as the user progresses.
Languages can be practiced in any pairing and in any direction! For example, English->French, French->English, French->Spanish, Spanish->French, Spanish-Arabic, Arabic->Spanish, Arabic->Chinese, Chinese->Arabic, etc.
Plus, it seems that Vocabfish has employed technology that allows all script (like Arabic and Chinese) and diacritic marks to be viewable across all browsers!
The one thing the site is currently missing is audio files, so that beginner level users can hear the words. After corresponding with the site's owner, it is my understanding audio files are being developed, as well as industry-specific categories.
Overall, I highly recommend Vocabfish.com.
