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3 November 2009: Version 0.05
 This release adds a new vocabulary topic plus some minor fixes.
 Download Vocabularium

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Vocabularium running under Linux.

Free Spanish vocabulary software

From this page, you can download some free software to help you learn Spanish vocabulary. At present, you can download a beta version of Vocabularium, a program that allows you to create vocabulary podcasts.

Vocabularium

Vocabularium is a tool for creating audio podcasts to help you learn Spanish vocabulary. It essentially works as follows:

• from the options screen, you select the vocabulary topic of your podcast (note that new releases of the software will periodically be made with more topics);
• each topic contains sub-topics which you can switch on or off (for example, the Clothes topic has sub-topics including types of coats, types of trousers etc);
• you select the voices that you want to read the Spanish vocabulary and English glosses (see below for information about downloading voices);
• then, you click Create Podcast, where you will be prompted to set a file name; clicking Create then starts the podcast creation process;
• then, you sit back and have a coffee or go to lunch— depending on the voice you've selected, the creation process takes a few minutes.

You should now have a lovely, shiny podcast to listen to. Copy the resulting file to your favourite WAV or MP3 player (or iPod if Apple will let you) to listen to while you're on the bus or tube, walking the dog, or in a particularly dull meeting, geography lesson etc.

Supported operating systems

This software runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS and Linux.

Download and installation

There are a few components you need to install before you start using Vocabularium to produce your first podcast:

1. Download Vocabularium

2. Download voices

Then, go to the Cepstral voices download page and download versions of the following for your system (assuming you don't already have them):

• either, or both, of the Americas Spanish voices (Miguel is probably the better of the two, but it costs you nothing to try them both);
• one or more of the English voices; I recommend starting with UK English: Lawrence.

I recommend the Cepstral voices as a starting point because they're pretty good quality and fairly affordable if you decide to by the licensed version. At present, they're the only supported options under non-Windows systems. If you're running Windows, you can in principle use any SAPI 5 compliant voice, such as the AT&T Natural Voices, currently priced at USD 35.

You can use the free demonstration versions of the Cepstral voices to create podcasts. Until you license the voices, the only inconvenience is that a nag message is likely to appear at the beginning of the podcast asking you to buy a licence; all other features of both the voices and this software will be available. If you decide to license the voices to remove the nag message, they cost USD 29.99 each. (Note: if you have unlicensed Spanish and English voices, you'll get a nag in each language; Windows users could consider using a free, lower-quality English voice to avoid paying for two voices.)

3. Download Java

If you don't already have a recent version, download Java for your system. In principle, Java version 5 onwards is supported. But it's recommended that you get a recent update of version 6.

4. Download LAME

You need to download LAME, if you want to save your podcasts in MP3 format (for WAV format, this step isn't necessary):

• Under Windows, this is a zip file that you need to drag into the window when prompted. When you first run the program, you'll be invited to install LAME. Otherwise, you'll be asked to install it when you first try to save one of your vocab podcasts in MP3 format. Just follow the on-screen instructions at that point.
• Under Linux/Mac OS, you need to install LAME prior to running Vocabularium. See the Lame web site for information on downloading LAME.

Running the program

Once you've downloaded vocabularium.jar, copy it to some convenient place, such as your desktop, or a new folder that you create for it. Then under Windows, you can simply double-click on this file to run the program.

Under Linux, depending on your distribution, you may find that you need to run the program from the command-line. To do this, change to the directionry where you put vocabularium.jar and type:

  java -jar vocabularium.jar

Other voice options

Under Windows, you can use other SAPI-compliant voices; see Vocabularium voice options.

Known issues

See also the page of known issues with this release.