Learning vocabulary can be difficult. Trying to remember words from audio files or text on a page can be very boring and is not an effective way of learning for most people. From audio you practice listening, from text you practice reading. This can be helpful to a certain extent, but it’s not nearly as effective as actively practicing to use these words. Ouino helps with listening and reading, but focuses on methods of memorization with the exercises.

Ouino vocabulary lessons. In Ouino, every single vocabulary word is supported by not only text and audio, but also representative images for your brain to create a visual association with the word. Many of the adjectives and adverbs are also supported by an example sentence to reinforce even more. When you take a Ouino vocabulary lesson, listen attentively and try to repeat the words out loud. If you are on the bus or in a public place, you might want to practice your pronunciation later to avoid a few stares. Then again, people talking to themselves on public transport is not something that is unheard of. Your own weirdness is in your hands. Ouino is in your pocket if you need it, but it will also be on your computer when you get home.

Adjust the settings menu. You can play with the settings menu (gear icon at the top right of your screen) to adjust the lessons to your learning style. Change the pronunciation playback speed (PPS) of the audio and the number of times words are repeated. You can also change the amount of time between each word and change the subtitles.

Learning the gender of vocabulary. It’s no secret that in many languages, nouns have a gender. A question that most language teachers get is “How do I know if a noun is masculine or feminine?”. This question is hard to answer because in most cases, there is no hard-and-fast rule for identifying the gender of a noun (the difficulty also depends on the language learned). Sure, there are some tricks that will help you (and you will learn them in the Building Blocks module of the course), but there are countless exceptions. Basically, you just have to know the gender from memory.

As a solution to this problem, we have included a few features in the Vocabulary lessons that will help you immensely to identify these dreaded genders. 1) Audio; masculine words are recorded by a male speaker and feminine words are recorded by a female speaker. 2) Visual; masculine words are written in blue lettering and feminine words are written in red lettering. Easy enough? If you ever have any doubts on the gender of a word, just try to recall the audio and visual of the word within the Ouino Vocabulary module.

These two features, along with the few gender tips in the Building Blocks module, will give you a big head start in learning the right gender of words.

Lesson completed. Now that you have completed the lesson (whether it was in 35 seconds, 7 minutes or any time in between) we need to take that new knowledge from your conscious mind to your unconscious mind. How do we do that? We practice! We practice until it is trapped in your unconscious mind forever.

When you load the Vocabulary exercises, you will see 4 different categories. There are no strict rules about how to use these exercises to your advantage, but the final goal should be to get the Fluency Award in the Fluency Sprint. This can be very difficult. If you can do that, Bingo! You are fluent in that category and you have a nice Red Ribbon to prove it.

How you reach that level is entirely up to you. If you are the person with the perfect photographic memory or if you have learned these words somewhere else in the past and just want to see if you still remember them, you can skip a level or skip right to the Fluency Sprint exercise and try to get that Fluency Award. Your score will be updated on the previous levels also.

For most language learners, skipping right to the Fluency Sprint is not the best way to go. If this is new material to you, we have observed that trying to save time by skipping right to the Fluency Sprint can actually be counterproductive. Most people actually end up taking a lot longer to get the Fluency Award than taking each exercise in order.

Level One: Beginner’s Luck. This exercise is like an image multiple choice. It gets you to associate the words you read and hear with images, along with the English words on the screen. Unlike when you sit back and watch a lesson, your brain is more active when you interact with the words. You have to create fast associations because the longer you take to answer, the less points you will get for your answer. You can take this exercise as many times as you want to get a score you’re satisfied with. You will see that your score quickly improves each time you take it. We recommend taking this exercise until you can get a Fluency Award. We have seen that in general people tend to save a lot of time on the harder levels if they receive a very high score in the easier exercises.

Level Two: Be All Ears. The first thing you will notice when you get to this second level is that it is very similar to the Beginner’s Luck exercise. The main difference is that the visual support of the written words have been removed. The purpose of this exercise is to train your ear to listen for the words without seeing them written down. It will also increase the repetition to help you get ready for the next level. Most people tend to get the Fluency Award fairly quickly if they completed the first level.

Level Three: Write-A-Word. In this third level, you will have to type the words in the program. This is the level that requires the most time for most people because there is no more guessing and spelling can be difficult. At this stage, you have to know the word in order to answer the question. The good news is that there is no time limit on this one! You could literally take 5 hours to complete the exercise and still receive a Fluency Award. This of course, is not recommended (and you should go back to previous levels if you have no idea what to answer), but it allows you to take your time. Going from a multiple choice to an actual writing exercise is a big step, so don’t worry if you are having trouble at first.

We have also included 3 optional hints for you to choose from. You can use these hints if you need help completing the exercise when you can’t quite remember a particular word. Keep in mind that each hint will cost you some points. Your points at the end of the exercise will reflect your final score. The more hints you use, the lowest your final score will be. Use the hints carefully and only when you really need them. Here’s a little breakdown of the hints available:

The “Add Letter” hint. Adds a correct letter somewhere in the word. This is very valuable particularly with shorter words. Cost: 5 points.

The “Scramble” hint. Adds all the correct letters of the word in a random order. Cost: 10 points.

The “Hear Answer” hint. Allows you to hear the answer out loud, all you have to do is to write it down, but it’s very costly. Cost: 20 points

Each correct answer is worth 65 points and a wrong answer will cost you 50 points. However, you will lose only 5 points for minor spelling mistakes or missing accents. The only way to get a Fluency Award in this exercise is to complete it without using any hints, and get your spelling right. It can be quite the challenge, but by now you have seen the words many times so you should start getting familiar with them. Do this exercise until you feel comfortable typing the words and move on to level 4.

Level Four: Fluency Sprint. All the previous exercise levels are meant to prepare you for this fourth and final level! The hints are no longer available and there is a time limit for each question. You have to know the words, know their correct spelling, and answer fast. Yes, it is very difficult, but the results do pay off in a big way. Although this level is the most difficult, many don’t have to spend too much time on it, especially if they received a Fluency Award on the Write-A-Word exercise. Get a Fluency Award in this level and we consider you fluent in this particular vocabulary category. Awesome!

These four levels may seem like they take a long time to complete, but in reality you will find that this method will allow you to learn lots of vocabulary very quickly. Like previously mentioned, we have seen many people trying to take the lesson and skipping right to the Fluency Sprint exercise. In general, they end up taking a lot more time to get the same results. We also found that if asked to take the exercise again after a few weeks, they scored lower than those who took all 4 exercises in half the time. That’s because taking all 4 levels makes you interact with the words more often and in different ways, which greatly helps with memorization.

After being fluent in a few categories, go practice what you learned in the real world and begin to see the real benefits of learning a new language!