Sorted Word Lists: Modern Languages By Books/Sections of Books

[dbielby]

I am preparing a course on Genesis. It will be taught in a bi-lingual context. I would like to make a list of all the English words for each week's lesson so that the students can prepare by studying the English words we will use the next week. I would also like to make a similar list for myself so I can study the Chinese words. Is there a way to do this with BW9? If so, how?

For example: Week 1 I would like to have a list of English words from the Creation & Flood accounts sorted by order of frequency (most frequent first). It would be slick if I could offer a single or short term reference column for Hebrew/Greek and/or Mandarin next to each word as well.

[Adelphos]

Dave,

It seems that you can do what you want pretty easily with the WLM (Word List Manager).

Open WLM, then click Load or Generate Word List

Choose Load words from a Bible version

Make sure that in the list box above that you have selected whichever English translation you want.

Go to the Verse Range box and, for example, on the Creation portion, I would guess you might want to limit the data to Genesis 1-2

Then click on Create List

Now, once back in the WLM main window, you will see that the words are ordered by frequency. You can alter the sort order in the sort menu. If you want to reverse the order by frequency, paste into Word or Excel or whatever and do it that way.

Back in the WLM, click on the Secondary Word List button.

Now click once again on Load or Generate Word List

Now choose a different Bible version OR - if you want to put the Flood account next to the previous list, then keep the same English version and simply set your search limits to the appropriate chapters, i.e., Genesis 6 &c.

If you would rather put Chinese words in that box, then choose a Chinese Bible version, set your search limits once again to Genesis 1-2, generate your list, and now the Chinese words will be in the Secondary list.

And so forth.

The WLM is prettey powerful. You can do a whole lot with it.

For help on the WLM, hover your mouse anywhere over it and press F!.

[dbielby]

I had already tried that and had a problem. So I posted this question to see if there was another way. My barrier is that BW9 is not displaying the Mandarin Chinese characters (yes I have language support on my computer). It is displaying the code for each character. When I paste the list into a clipboard, then the characters are re-interpreted. So this tells me that the issue is within BibleWorks. Do you think so? Should I contact tech support or is there another way around this issue?

[Adelphos]

I had already tried that and had a problem. So I posted this question to see if there was another way. My barrier is that BW9 is not displaying the Mandarin Chinese characters (yes I have language support on my computer). It is displaying the code for each character. When I paste the list into a clipboard, then the characters are re-interpreted. So this tells me that the issue is within BibleWorks. Do you think so? Should I contact tech support or is there another way around this issue?

I noticed the same thing when I used any of the Chinese versions in the WLM, so I think your analysis is correct. I would definitely contact tech support and see if it's supposed to be that way or not.

[dbielby]

Tech support just reminded me (I had heard this somewhere once before, but forgot) that the type of font that Mandarin uses as well as some other languages, a double byte type font is not supported in Bibleworks. No promise on if or when it will be supported, but they did not exclude the possibility either.So I suppose I could work around it since the actual data that can display the correct characters is actually there. I'm just not that savvy of a software guy to figure that one quickly. One would think that since Windows supports these fonts that it's power could somehow be allowed to assist on this, but that might not be so easy to do.

[Adelphos]

Well, maybe they'll work it out. It might be a little more complicated to infuse the change into the WLM, though. Only the programmers know what obstacles have to be overcome for that.

My BOSS program strips the numbers for you, but the only problem with that is that BOSS 1.0 is now defunct, and I don't at this point plan on ever finishing BOSS 2.0. That may change, but the odds are low.

So the only thing else I could suggest is that either you - or someone for you if you can't do it - write a short macro in VBA for Word so that you could automatically strip the numbers once you paste into Word.

Then I think you'd be home free, because you're ultimately - I think - going to have to paste everything into tables in Word anyway. The fact that the Chinese characters transfer over to Word and display in their normal font is a big help. You don't have to do any re-formatting, at least not with my version of Word, which is Office 2010.

So in other words, other than the numbers, I don't think it's really a problem. Just run your query in the WLM, do a "select all" and then copy/paste into Word. If Iunderstand your intentions, then that is pretty much all you have to do.

[Adelphos]

Dave,

I've written a quick simple macro in VBA that will strip the numbers for you if you want it. Just go to my website, click on any of the options there and that will take you to a screen which has a menu on the top of the window. At the far right of that menu is a "Contact" option. Click on that to email me if you want the macro. This simple macro works for Word 2010. I don't know about earlier versions.

To use the macro, Open the VBA Editor by pressing Alt+F11, paste the macro exactly as is into the very bottom of your VBA editor, save it, and then it should appear with the name "StripNumbers" in your macro box. To run the macro, place the cursor at the top of the page (Ctrl+Home), and then choose "Run Macro" and choose "StripNumbers" to run this macro.

Make sure that you ONLY have the one column to run this macro, as I have inserted no error-checking or other complexities into the macro. Just one column with chinese chars (or any other type chars) on the left and the frequency numbers on the right.