Two of my grandchildren are growing up bilingual. Their American mom talks to them in English, while their Swedish dad sticks to his native language. This is absolutely wonderful for the kids, but this English-speaking grandmother doesn’t really want to have her grandchildren saying things she doesn’t understand. So the quest to learn Swedish begins. As you might expect in this TechMates column, I found a wonderful pairing of hardware and software to help me.

The hardware is the trusty Dell Axim X30 I use for keeping track of appointments and storing addresses. I also use the Axim to make short voice recordings and to listen to audio books.

The Axim has a 624MHz processor with 64MB SDRAM. This gives it plenty of power to run the included applications such as Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. To be honest, I seldom use these as I don’t like being confined to a tiny screen and on-screen keyboard or the Transcriber shortcut text entry. I prefer to grab my laptop when it comes to working on Word documents or spreadsheets. I usually use my laptop to view Web pages and write email. Yet I have used the Axim’s (optional) Wi-Fi capabilities to hook up to a wireless network to retrieve an important email or check a news article every now and then. Also, this Pocket PC runs the Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition operating system, which allows me to switch the display from landscape to portrait. I use this feature all the time. The X30 has built-in Bluetooth wireless (another optional add-on), which is another feature that I don’t often use. I tend to stick to the simpler tasks such as showing off pictures of the family on the screen.

Talk The Talk

But this month I expanded the use of my Axim. I paired it with the LingvoSoft Gold Talking Dictionary for Pocket PC. I was totally amazed by the number of languages in which LingvoSoft publishes this software. Choices include the usual Spanish, Italian, French, and German, but go on to cover over 40 other languages such as Polish, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, and Yiddish. Of course, I chose the English-Swedish edition.

The software installation was a breeze. I already had the Axim set up on my PC, so all I had to do is attach the Axim to the computer, download the software, and click Install. At the end of the installation process, a message appeared on the Axim prompting me to restart it. When it rebooted, the software was up and running. You can scroll through an extensive list of words. The Gold version boasts 360,000 words and phrases.

If you click the box to enter your own word, a keyboard appears on the screen. You can even create your own list of words, called a Filtered List. The dictionary is bidirectional. You can go from English to Swedish or Swedish to English with a tap of the stylus.

The program works very well, but I was disappointed in the “talking” part. Many, but not all, English words could be pronounced, but it couldn’t pronounce anything in Swedish. The man’s voice was very stilted. It improved slightly when I realized that I could control the volume, rate, and pitch of the voice, but I was still unimpressed.

LingvoSoft is planning to release updated versions of all Pocket PC dictionaries with an improved TTS (text-to-speech) engine this fall. These talking dictionaries will provide pronunciation of words in both languages, a big improvement.

The LingvoSoft dictionaries come in several versions: Basic ($14.95) and Standard ($24.95) are less expensive than Gold. There’s even a trial version. These cheaper dictionaries have fewer words, but as they are more commonly used words, these versions might be adequate for many users. I am more likely to be looking for words and phrases such as grandmother (mormor), wave (vinka), hello (god dag), and it’s raining (detregnar). The LingvoSoft Web site (www.lingvosoft.com) also has useful free online translation dictionaries.

While this dictionary is not exactly an intensive course in learning Swedish, it will certainly come in handy, both here and on my next trip to Sweden. Also, I love being able to make better use of my Pocket PC.

by Sandy Berger

Sandy Berger is a nationally respected technology author and computing expert. Sandy’s aim is to convey to others in easy-to-understand language what they need to know to take advantage of today’s technology. Visit her at http://www.compukiss.com or email her at SandyB@smartcomputing.com.