Lexinomicon

Lexinomicon presents written exercises meant to accompany the 8th edition of Deutsch heute. The syllabus will point you toward those items that you should practice as part of your regular assignment. Also available are general review exercises for somewhat more advanced students.

• 1) Keep your sessions short. You won't do yourself any good sitting at the terminal for hours. When you find the drills getting mechanical, do something else for a while.
• 2) Make your sessions as frequent as possible. Rote learning is like training for an athletic event. It can't be crammed in at the last minute but must be spread out over time, with interludes of something else, including rest.
• 3) Pay attention to what you are doing. If you find yourself just going through the motions, even if you are producing correct answers, you are wasting your time. Pause to consider what the particular exercise is trying to accomplish. Make sure you know what each word means. Think of what variations would look like.
• 4) Do not confuse passive understanding with active knowledge. Especially if you have had previous exposure to German, you will be tempted to think that recognizing forms is the same as generating them. It is not. "Oh, I knew that" is not a true statement. Do not move on to another item until you have actually produced the right answer.

Here's how to install the application Lexinomicon on your computer. Please read all of the instructions before losing patience. Note that there is a "trouble-shooting" section below.

Macintosh Users need to have OS 10.3 or better - if you have an earlier system, you'll have to make do with DrillBits or Kartoffel - (see the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this page).

• Download the Lexinomicon installer at http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/lexinomicon/install/install.htm.
• Open Lexinomicon3.14Release.dmg and drag the Lexinomicon folder to your computer's Applications Folder
• Proceed to the next section, Installing the German Workbooks.

• Java 5 update 12. Many Windows systems may already have a version of Java installed. You may confirm the version by using the Control Panel: Add Remove applications tool. If you have Java 6 installed you will need to uninstall it and then install Java 5. Disable automatic Java updates to prevent accidentally installing Java 6. If you have any version of Java 5 installed you are most likely fine and may choose to either upgrade to update 12 or proceed with the installation. We are aware of this problem and hope to have a new release of Lexinomicon which works with Java 6 available soon.
    If necessary, download and install Java Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 12. Accept the license agreement and select the "Windows Offline Installation, Multi-language" option.
• iTunes for Windows. Many Windows systems may already have a version of iTunes installed. You may confirm this by using the Control Panel: Add Remove applications tool. If you have iTunes installed you are most likely fine and may either upgrade to update 12 or proceed with the installation.
    If necessary, download and install iTunes
• Download the Lexinomicon installer at http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/lexinomicon/install/install.htm.
  The installer will place Lexinomicon in your Start Items forcing Lexinomicon to start when you start your computer. In some cases this is not desirable. You may disable this by removing the Lexinomicon shortcut from your list of Startup Items, which for XP users can be found through: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup If you disable the automatic startup, you'll want to drag the Lexinomicon program icon to the list of programs you access through your Start button. This icon can be found through: C:\Program Files\Lexinomicon
• Proceed to the next section, Installing the German Workbooks.

  Installation Problems: If you have trouble installing Lexinomicon, contact Mark A. O'Neil. Be sure to tell him what computer system you are using, as well as how and when things went wrong. Otherwise, he can't do much for you.

  If for some reason you still can't get Lexinomicon to work, a temporary solution is DrillBits, an older version. For instructions on how to access and use that, click here.

  And if that doesn't work either, Plan C is to use http://schiller.dartmouth.edu/~kartoffel/ in the interim. These excercises are from the 6th edition of Deutsch heute, but they can be used in a pinch. Kapitel 1 of "Kartoffel" is similar to the Einführung of our text; Kapitel 2 of "Kartoffel" = Kapitel 1 of our text, etc. The button "nachprüfen" is what you click on to check your answers.