Numbers  - Fluency in foreign numbers

by Richard Taylor

Numbers is designed to improve your numeric fluency in French, German, Spanish and Italian. As a result you will instantly 'recognise' numbers, as you do in English, instead of having to work them out.

The application is loaded in the normal way. Clicking on the Numbers icon in the RISC User menu system will install it on the icon bar. Clicking on this new icon brings up the main window. At the top of the window are radio icons to select your chosen language. Below the numbers 0 to 99 are laid out in a square grid. Click on any number you wish and it will appear in your chosen language beneath the grid.

Once you have learnt the numbers (or refreshed your memory), click on the Start icon and a randomly chosen number will appear - in red. You now need to find, and then click on this number in the grid. The computer will then display the time you took.
Clicking on the Start icon will bring up a new number. Note that an average time is also displayed and this is updated after each attempt. To reset this time and start afresh, simply click on the Reset icon at the bottom of the window.

As a rough guide, an average time of around two seconds would indicate reasonable fluency, though admittedly by this stage a good time may depend more on dexterity with the mouse than anything else.


 Copyright RISC User Magazine 1995