Settings
Settings holds the preferences that apply everywhere in the app: languages, appearance, session size, pace and grading, speech, dictionaries and your study data.
- iPhone and iPad — tap ⋯ at the top right of the main screen and choose Settings. Done closes it, and ? explains it.
- Mac — a window of its own: LinguaMorpha → Settings… or ⌘,.
There are four tabs: General, Study, a tab named after the course you are studying (Spanish, French or Latin) with that course's own settings, and Progress. On iPhone and iPad the tabs are a switch at the top; on the Mac they are icons along the top of the window.
Settings and the selection rows are different things. Settings are app-wide preferences. The selection rows at the top of each hub’s Practice section are where you choose which words, groups or tenses are in play; it lives in the hub, not here.
General
Languages
- App language — English, Dutch or Spanish. It sets the language of the app's menus, labels and help, and the language translations are shown in. The language you are studying is not offered — a translation into it would only repeat the word — and a note says so. The App language applies to every learner on the device.
The course is not chosen here but in Scheme and level, by choosing one of its schemes (see Levels).
On the Mac the menu bar is built when the app starts, so after changing App language the app offers Restart Now or Later; the rest of the app switches at once.
Preferences
- Appearance — System, Dark or Light. System follows your device.
Hints (iPhone and iPad)
- Show swipe hints again — replays the swipe hint on the flashcard drills, the one that shows which way to swipe for knew it and didn't.
Study
- Questions per session — how many questions a session asks: 10, 20 (the default), 30, 50, or ∞ (keep going until you stop). It applies to every drill.
- Learning pace — Relaxed, Balanced (the default) or Intensive: the mix of words you have already seen and new words in each session. Relaxed leans on review, Intensive on new material, Balanced splits evenly. See Adaptive learning — how it works.
- Auto-advance after correct answer — on by default. After a correct answer the drill moves to the next question by itself; a wrong answer always waits for Next, so you can read the correction. A choice drill that explains every answer (the agreement, shortening, preposition and pronoun drills) never advances by itself: Next, or Return, moves on once you have read the explanation.
- Auto-advance after — shown while auto-advance is on: how long the drill waits first, 1 s, 2 s (the default), 3 s or 5 s.
Grading
- Exact spelling — off by default. Then a typed answer with a wrong or missing accent (Spanish, French) or long mark (Latin) counts as correct, with a note that shows the right spelling; in Spanish, so does a small typo in a verb form. French and Latin forgive only accents and long marks, not typos. The exception is an answer that spells another form of the same word — the note under the switch gives an example in the course you study — which is wrong, because it is a different form. With Exact spelling on, only the exact spelling counts. It applies where you type: Produce the conjugation, and in Latin also Decline the noun and Decline the adjective. A picked answer is always graded on the exact form. One setting for all courses.
The course tab
Levels
- Level schemes — opens the level-schemes dialog; the row shows the scheme in use. See Levels.
Spanish and French
Voice & Conjugation
- Voice — the speech voice for the course's language. On iPhone and iPad the row shows the current voice and opens a screen with the voice list and the Speed slider. On the Mac the voice menu and the slider sit directly in the tab.
- Speed — how fast forms are spoken, from Slowest to Fastest. One speed applies to every course.
- Include pronoun — speaks the pronoun (yo / tú / él…, je / tu / il…) in front of each spoken conjugation. On by default.
Dictionary services
The pages of verbs, nouns, phrases and other words have a book icon in the toolbar; tap it for a menu of online dictionaries:
- Linguee — example sentences from real translated texts.
- WordReference — bilingual entries with usage notes.
- Reverso — translations in context and conjugation tables.
- RAE — the Real Academia Española's dictionary (Spanish only).
Tap a switch to choose which dictionaries the menu offers. All four are on at first, and the sites are free to use; once you know which ones you reach for, switch off the rest to keep the menu short. With none on, the book disappears.
The French tab offers the same switches without RAE, and the choices are shared: a dictionary switched off on one tab is off on the other. Latin has no dictionary row. On iPhone and iPad a dictionary opens in a browser sheet inside the app; on the Mac it opens in your web browser.
Latin
Latin has no Voice row and no dictionaries; see Setting up speech.
Progress
The tab is headed Progress of and the name of the current learner: everything on it, except the last row, is about that learner.
- Study History — the learner's record of sessions and answers, from every course. Export writes a dated folder of CSV files with every session and answer: keep it as a backup, open it in Numbers or Excel, or import it on another device. Import reads such a folder, or the files inside it; the answers are added to what is already there, nothing is replaced or removed, and importing the same export twice changes nothing. Only your own history can be imported: an export made under another Apple Account is refused, and for an export that does not say whose it is, the app asks Whose history is this? before going on. An export of another learner on this device asks first too (Another learner's history). Practice sets are not included — they have their own export (see Practice Sets).
- Reset Progress — deletes the current learner's recorded answers, in every course. Reset verb, noun, word or phrase progress on its own, or Reset all progress to delete every answer and session. Each asks for confirmation. Your word selections, settings, scheme and level are not affected.
- Erase all data and settings — deletes every learner's progress, all settings, schemes and levels, and the dictionary choices, and returns the app to its first-launch state, with the welcome screens. It asks for confirmation and cannot be undone.
Voice and speed
LinguaMorpha speaks with the voices that Apple installs on your device (see Setting up speech). To choose one:
- Open Settings and switch to the tab for your course.
- On iPhone and iPad, tap Voice. The list shows every installed voice for the language, each with its flag and Apple's quality label — Standard, Enhanced or Premium. Voices for the course's main region come first, then the other regions, best quality first. On the Mac, choose from the Voice menu.
- Pick a voice.
- Drag Speed to taste.
If no voice is installed for the language, the screen says so and tells you where to download one.