In this paper, a novel Elman-type recurrent neural network (RNN) is presented for the binary classification of arbitrary symbol sequences, and a novel training method, including both evolutionary and local search methods, is evaluated using sequence databases from a wide range of scientific areas. An efficient, publicly available, software tool is implemented in C++, accelerating significantly (more than 40 times) the RNN weights estimation process using both simd and multi-thread technology. The experimental results, in all databases, with the hybrid training method show improvements in a range of 2% to 25% compared with the standard genetic algorithm.