About the Dictionary
I came up with the idea for the "dictionary with sounds and images" while I was studying Russian in college. I constantly mangled the pronunciations of words that I looked up in the dictionary and wished I could hear them pronounced when I looked them up. I also became frustrated with the traditional way of learning new vocabulary - namely, associating a word in Russian with an English translation. It would be much better, I thought, to learn the Russian words for objects the same way I had learned the English words for objects - by associating them with the object the word represented. It would be really great if pictures, Cyrillic text and sound were all together in one package.
Fortunately for me, by the time I had this brainstorm, computer technology had advanced far enough for me to begin creating such a thing. I spent a couple of years playing around with Hypercard and Supercard versions of the dictionary. I tried a Web version early on, but before frames and JavaScript, it was very limited and did not have all of the features that I wanted. Finally, after countless hours of coloring clipart, recording and editing sounds, and exploring the mysteries of JavaScript, I ended up with what you see here today.
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