Flash Cards & Factoids — Learning To Speak a Foreign Language

Factoid (Italian) - Full Vocabulary

A while ago I stumbled upon a way to receive a daily eMail delivering a Word Of The Day in various languages — as a learning tool — and I soon realized that without any way to manipulate these "Factoids", they were soon going to go the way of all my other by-gone eMail. Yet I had a burning desire to make use of this rich source of information and training — because it actually speaks the language — so I decided to use my favorite set of Microsoft technologies to provide this "deck of cards" in a way that I felt would best suite my personal learning style — hence "Factoids".

In this article I'm going to talk about a .Net prototype I've created using the MVVM design pattern, called Factoids. This Silverlight tool is aimed at helping ordinary people create and organize multi-media Flash Cards and to then use them for anything that fits the familiar paradigm such as — in the case of my prototype — learning to speak Italian. You use the cards (The Factoids App)  in a wide variety of workflows all aimed at helping you to (a) see one side of "the card", and then (b) recall what's on the other side of the card.