This is a program to help rapidly learn to chant a torah portion, not by heart, but by visual trigger from each phrase of Hebrew. By loading an image, regions, transliterations and sound files for each hebrew phrase, a student can focus on one phrase at a time, which is better than listening and singing along to a cassette or CD. 

To learn start with both the audio and the english transliteraton, singing along with the canter while reading the hebrew in english. Then turn the english off and try to read and sing along with just the hebrew groups of words as they appear in the Torah.  then stop clicking for the and use your mouse as if it was the 'yod'!


Make more blasters!

The program looks for files of type "*.TRH" in the directory. These files specify a bitmap, rectangles and associated soundfiles and transliterations.

They can be made up in about 15 minutes by any computer expert.

The JPG image file of the portion shall be no wider than 750 cubits and no higher than 500 cubits. Each line of Hebrew should be about 50 cubits.

Use an HTML editor which can do "image maps" to find the regions for each phrase, up to two rectangles, chop the audio into PCM 11.025 MHZ wav files, and put the information in the form specified below in a file of type ".trh". When the program runs, it reads all the information and builds the regions and actions. Thus any portion or prayer can be loaded into this trainer.

All the files associated with a portion, (exe, ini, wav, jpg), should be in one directory with the cncs32.DLL put in windows/system32 or winnt/system32.

The test.trh file is below and demonstrates the proper format.

First a section [param] specifies the image of the portion and the number of phrases.  Then each phrase is specified with up to 2 rectangles (COORDS and COORD2). This complication is necessary to deal with phrases which have line breaks. Each region represents (left, top, right, bottom) from the top corner of the bitmap.  The sound files are WAV, PCM 11.025 MHz.

This program is hereby released into the public domain.
Jordan Pollack
bigname@scientist.com
January 2006



---------sample *.trh file below---------------
[param]
regions=2
image="par1012a.jpg"

[shape1]
coords="596,55,767,102"
coord2="15,5,172,57"
sound="par10_01.WAV"
english="vi-ah-su ah-rone at-say she-team"

[shape2]
coords="396,56,594,105"
sound="par10_02.WAV"
english="a-ma-tayim vi-hay-tzee"
