Talking Language Helper flash card software for learning Ts'msyen

Talking Language Helper is software that assists in the learning of Ts'msyen (also represented as Tsimshian), a First Nations language of northern British Columbia, Canada. It is essentially, a flash card program for interacting with Ts'msyen words and memorizing them. It includes a large corpus of audio files and accompanying images.

The flash card entries for Talking Language Helper are generated from a dictionary project. Details of this project can be found at: http://smalgyax.unbc.ca as well as the online version of the dictionary.

Talking Language Helper is freely distributed by University of Northern British Columbia and will be available for download here and at http://smalgyax.unbc.ca in early 2012.

There is not any formal partnership between UNBC and CanIL. CanIL is an SIL International training program (www.sil.org/training). CanIL provided conversion support for taking the dictionary database stored in FieldWorks (fieldworks.sil.org - an SIL International product) and exporting the data to xml, html and Talking Language Helper formats. Talking Language Helper was developed in Filemaker Pro by Larry Hayashi specifically for the Ts'mysen dictionary project.

Screenshots from Talking Language Helper

Welcome screen

An example flash card (front and back showing)

A matching game