Do it yourself
Start a new text file within Cerebware and type the list manually.
Don't forget that Cerebware lists always have the foreign item first, then a colon, and then one or more English defnitions separated by semi-colons.
You can get vocabulary content from anywhere you want. Think of a theme, type some English words, and then look them up in an online dictionary. This is slow, but some people learn the material while they are looking up the defnitions, and can skip straight to the revision stage. Copy the list from your favourite textbook, or paste the list in from a website. If necessary, paste the text into the Trainer's Text Editor, or your favourite word processor, and do a global 'replace' to change the existing delimiter to the Cerebware delimiter ':'. If the list has the English on the left, convert it to a table first and then switch the columns, or use the flip-list utility in the Trainer. (Or you can try Cerebware's crafty web-mining tool that downloads lists from tables on the internet).
When you are finished, save the list as a plain text file (or as a unicode text file if it contains Asian scripts).
Give your new list the suffix '.lst', to mark it as suitable for importing into Cerebware. Save it in your main Vocab Trainer folder, or a suitable subfolder such as GermanThemes. Don't be phased by the suffix: a list file is still just a text file. You can edit it within a word processor, add words to it, do spell-checks, print it out, paste it in an e-mail, and so on. (Cerebware differs from many other flashcard programs in that it keeps lists in human-readable form.)
WARNING: If you are working in Windows with the 'hide extensions for known file types' option set, and edit your list within Notepad or another Windows program, then Windows will assume you need a .txt (or .doc) suffix and just add it without asking you. The secretly added suffix will be invisible in all Windows programs, but is actually still there as an integral part of the file name for all other programs. (Worse still, this behaviour is inconsistent. Annoyingly, the secret addition of .txt stops happening as soon as Windows decides that .lst is a "known" file type. Basically, this is when you tell it you like to open .lst files with Notepad). This has nothing to do with the Trainer, and happens with all suffixes that Windows does not know about. It is all part of the famous patronising Windows approach. Windows adds this option to make the computer less scary to computer-phobic users, but for anyone using non-standard file types it invariably leads to confusion. Whenever I buy a new computer, turning this behaviour off is one of the first things I do (see picture below - this behaviour can be toggled within the Folder Options of Windows Explorer).
Using your list
The simplest way to start learning the words in your list is to import it into your vocabulary. Open your vocab file, or make a new one, then import the list.
Cerebware List Conventions
We recommend that all Cerebware lists adhere to the following format:
If you are prepared to share your lists, please send Cerebware copies, and in turn we will send you copies of other people's lists.
Using an External Database
List creation is much easier if the vocab trainer has an attached database of definitions, but this is currently only available for German. The downloadable database at dict.cc is the best option we have found so far, and all serious users should visit the dict.cc site to obtain a copy. Once the database has been downloaded, and converted to Cerebware format, then new lists can be created with little effort using one of these techniques: