RiteVia Engword is a free language learning tool that emphasizes learning-through-listening, virtually the way any native language speaker uses. Isn't it marvelous that a three years old child can listen and speak his or her mother tongue with no difficulty? In a sense, this is because the child is "forced" to listen to others in his or her daily life. Listening and then mimicking is an important stage of any language learning. While listening and mimicking alone is not enough to master a language, it is a main factor that makes a difference between a native language speaker and a foreigner.

RiteVia Engword, previously known as Engword, came into existence in the late '90s. It was initially designed for learning English only, but later for learning both English and Chinese. Major revisions have been done in recent versions to address the issue that, as pointed out by some users, there were too many options and hidden functions in earlier versions. After a long time of development, RiteVia Engword has now become a unique language learning tool. RiteVia Engword runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.

Roughly, RiteVia Engword
        = Media Player
        + Sound Recording
        + Sound Repeating
        + Lyrics Editing
        + Electronic Dictionaries
        + Screen Capture
        + Content Library (English/Chinese words, phrases, sentences)
        + Media Library (images, animations, audios, videos)
        + Playing Management (filtering, spelling, repeating, etc.)
        + Other features (content extraction, dictionary encryption, voice alarm, etc.)

• Media Player: Support playing a variety of image (bmp/??jpg/gif/png), animation (gif), audio (wav/mp3/m4a/aac, etc.), and video (asf/avi/wmv/mp4, etc.) formats. Support playing files (including online files), directories, or a word list (or a text file containing the word list) through drag and drop. Provide the function for displaying lyrics, captions, and subtitles and the function for synchronizing the playing and the highlighting of the related content. For any audio or video file, besides the default lyrics, captions, and subtitles that are automatically loaded, other lyrics, captions, and subtitles, probably in a different language, can be loaded on demand to meet users' different needs.
  
  
• Sound Recording: Provide a record-while-playing function to enable the user to record whatever is played by RiteVia Engword. The recording can be customized through the control of various playing settings, such as playing speed, playing order (dictionary order or random order), repeating times, whether to play the meaning, whether to insert silence so that the user can repeat the pronunciation, and so on. The played items are embedded as synchronous lyrics in the output mp3 file, which can be played on mp3 players, smart phones, and other platforms. Also provide a general-purpose sound recorder, which can record from any recording device or playing device. Recording from any playing device means recording whatever is played on the computer, no matter it is from RiteVia Engword or from any other program. In addition, some auxiliary functions are provided to facilitate the recording, for example, delay the recording, automatically stop the recording after a certain period of time or after the detection of long silence, automatically trim or pad the silence at the beginning and end of the file to a given length, and add common mp3 tag information such as title, artist, album, etc.
  
  
• Sound Repeating: Provide a repeating-it-yourself playing mode and a general-purpose sound repeater. The repeating-it-yourself playing mode allows the user to repeat (i.e., mimic) the pronunciation after an item has been played. The user can repeat the pronunciation once or multiple times and the system will automatically detect the pronunciation and wait accordingly. The sound repeater can automatically repeat whatever the user has pronounced for a number of times depending on the setting, so the user can immediately hear his or her own pronunciation. The repeating-it-yourself playing mode and the sound repeater can be used together. This can be achieved by turning on the sound repeater while playing in repeating-it-yourself mode. Combining these two allows the user to first mimic the pronunciation the user has heard and then let the system immediately play the user's own pronunciation, thus giving the user the chance to compare his or her own pronunciation with what he or she has heard and make improvements as needed.
  
  
• Lyrics Editing: Provide an editor for adding or modifying lyrics (including captions and subtitles, the same below) for any video or audio file. While a normal text editor can also be used for lyrics editing, it is rather inefficient to do so. The editor included in RiteVia Engword provides some special functions that can significantly speed up the editing of lyrics. For example, a new timestamp can be inserted or an existing timestamp can be modified by double clicking a position on the timeline, dragging the arrow image above the timeline, or pressing a shortcut key; multiple lines can be edited together, including timestamp interpolation, timestamp offset adjustment, and timestamp deletion; waveforms can be displayed for some video (e.g., wmv and avi) files and audio (e.g., wav and mp3) files, which help the user to find the locations for lyrics on the timeline; and testing can be started at any time without leaving the editing window. Besides used for editing lyrics, the editor can also be used for synchronizing the meaning of an item, namely, by adding timestamps to the meaning to synchronize the playing of the item and the highlighting of its meaning.
  
  
• Electronic Dictionaries: Include English-Chinese dictionary, English dictionary, English thesaurus dictionary, English idiom dictionary, English acronyms and abbreviations, English concise encyclopedia, English jargon, Chinese-English dictionary, Chinese dictionary, Chinese thesaurus dictionary, and Chinese idiom dictionary. Support the lookup of English and Chinese words, Chinese pinyin (phonetic transcription), and stroke orders of Chinese characters. For each lookup input, provide a spelling suggestion list that is dynamically generated based on the usage frequencies of English and Chinese words. This not only increases the lookup efficiency, but also makes it easy for those who are not very good at spelling to use the lookup function. Maintain a list of recent lookups, including those through drag and drop, file browsing, and screen capture. This list, referred to as lookup records, can be used to replay a lookup or multiple lookups. Users can also save the list or part of it into a user dictionary for further study.
  
  
• Screen Capture: Screen capture can be performed through either hotkeys or mouse operations. It is designed to be triggered explicitly, that is, in an active way. This avoids the delay and prevents screen capture operations from being triggered unexpectedly, both of which can happen with a typical passive screen capture tool that adopts the hover-over-and-wait approach. It enables users to capure contents from various documents, for example, web pages, Word files, and PDF files. Users can manually select any word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and so on or let the program automatically pick up the word at the mouse location. They can choose to play the captured word or phrase (i.e., pronounce the item and provide interpretations), read the captured content (which can be a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, etc.) using the installed voice libraries or TTS engines, or simply save the captured content into the new words dictionary.
  
  
• Content Library: Provide more than 50 dictionaries, covering vocabularies from early childhood to college as well as those for standard tests such as TOEFL, SAT, and GRE; include nearly ten thousand spoken English/Chinese sentences. It is worth mentioning that, due to the different backgrounds that users may come from, those supplied dictionaries cannot meet everybody's needs and some contents may become out of date after a while. As such, what makes RiteVia Engword really useful and powerful is not the dictionaries that come with it, but the functions that allow users to easily create their own dictionaries. A dictionary is merely a text file that contains English and/or Chinese vocabularies. When a user chooses to play a dictionary, RiteVia Engword will automatically do the following for each item in the dictionary: provide English and/or Chinese meanings; find and display the associated image or animation; find and play the standard pronunciation or the associated video. All the user needs to do is keeping adding new vocabularies into the text file. Being able to tailor the content to one's own needs and learn whatever one wishes to learn is a key feature and a fundamental goal of RiteVia Engword.
  
  
• Media Library: Include standard American pronunciations (for one hundred and forty thousand English words and phrases) and Chinese Mandarin pronunciations (for forty thousand Chinese words and phrases), English and Chinese text to speech (TTS) engines, and nearly ten thousand images and animations for meaning illustration and for showing how to write Chinese characters. Users can also add their own images, animations, audios, and video to expand the media library. Besides the media library and the function for extending the media library, another function is also provided to enable the user to link items to media resources through the use of aliases. Using this function, for example, the user can point multiple related English and Chinese items to a single image for reuse purpose or point an item to different pronunciations (e.g., the Mandarin pronunciation and the Cantonese pronunciation of the item) for language or dialect switching purpose. This function makes the use of media resources extremely flexible and can substantially increase the utilization of media resources. Media library is used to support the playing of content library. It is the multimedia resources in the media library that turn the dull plaintext contents in the content library into vivid multimedia contents, thus making English and Chinese learning much more efficient and pleasant.
  
  
• Playing Management: Provide flag value based and item property based filtering functions to let users flexibly choose what to play. Support various playing modes and options, such as spelling playing, repeating-it-yourself playing, hiding-meaning playing, hiding-item playing, hiding-image playing, playing with pronunciation and video turned off, playing repeatedly (at the item level and/or group level) and on a loop (at the dictionary level), and so on. Display the word list of the current dictionary to facilitate users to view item properties, temporarily pick up one or more items for playing, and manage the flag values of items. Support word-in-word (WIW) playing, which is a unique and extremely powerful function of RiteVia Engword. A WIW refers to a word or phrase in the meaning of an item. WIW playing provides a way to group related contents (e.g., translations, synonyms, antonyms, male and female pronunciations for the same item, etc.) and play them together. It can be used to turn one dictionary into another for playing. For example, a single English-Chinese or Chinese-English dictionary can actually play the role of four dictionaries, namely, an English-Chinese dictionary, a Chinese-English dictionary, an English dictionary, and a Chinese dictionary. WIW playing can also be used to play the related Chinese item (or both the English item and the related Chinese item) when looking up an English item or vice versa.
  
  
• Other features: Provide tools for extracting contents, sorting items, converting text file encodings, merging dictionaries, and encrypting dictionaries. Provide a voice alarm clock function, which allows each user to create up to 99 alarm clocks. Each alarm clock can be set using relative time (e.g., in 10 minutes) or absolute time (e.g., at 14:30 on January 1, 2016). The alarm clock function supports multiple repeating options (e.g., repeating after a certain number of years, months, days, weekdays, weekend days, odd number days, even number days, or any period of time), date enumeration (i.e., enumerating the dates to be included or excluded), early reminder, snoozing, and action association (such as launching a program or browsing a web page). It allows users to view schedules for a certain date and/or for a specific voice alarm clock. It is also designed to automatically wake up a sleeping computer upon the occurrence of an event.

RiteVia Engword provides both English and Chinese user interfaces. It supports multiple-user operations and each user's environment settings, learning content, and learning progress are saved separately. RiteVia Engword is not a simple media player, an ordinary electronic dictionary, or a boring vocabulary brochure. Instead it is a combination of various useful functions. Its multimedia feature, rich and flexible playing modes and options, and open interfaces push the language learning efficiency to the limit and make it suitable for all levels of users. No matter you are a pre-school child or a college professor and no matter you use it for improving language proficiency or in test preparation, RiteVia Engword will not let you down.

Download      Program Screenshot      Functional Demos & Tutorials      Help Doc