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Software Proposal:- popup dictionary+SRS

 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
SweetMonia
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 Message 1 of 8
22 January 2011 at 9:55am | IP Logged 
Hi All!

I am a software developer looking for a niche software to implement, I came up with an idea for language learning utility and I think getting some feedbacks could help me decide to go with it or not, it's about making an offline pop-up dictionary and integrated word list because as a language learner, I find it boring to have to CTRL+V every word I translate into notepad and then again to a word list software(or any software), the dictionary will save all the translated words and automatically make lists of them for the language learner to revise them later, if desired, I could implement an integrated word list software to make the process much easier.

So, what do you guys think?

Edited by SweetMonia on 22 January 2011 at 9:59am

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Doitsujin
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 Message 2 of 8
22 January 2011 at 10:19am | IP Logged 
I hate to break it to you, but such software already exist. You only need to combine a free SRS like Anki with the free StarDict dictionay or the semi-commercial Babylon dictionaries. (StarDict has an optional automatic lookup mode that doesn't require any key-presses.)
If you want to put your programming skills to good use, why not create an Arabic popup dictionary like VerbAce, but with better integrated parser that shows all possible roots and patterns for any valid Arabic word like the Araflex web site.



Edited by Doitsujin on 22 January 2011 at 10:23am

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Kubelek
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 Message 3 of 8
22 January 2011 at 10:52am | IP Logged 
This guy is developing one as well

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7321


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SweetMonia
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 Message 4 of 8
22 January 2011 at 1:27pm | IP Logged 
Doitsujin wrote:
I hate to break it to you, but such software already exist. You only need to combine a free SRS like Anki with the free StarDict dictionay or the semi-commercial Babylon dictionaries. (StarDict has an optional automatic lookup mode that doesn't require any key-presses.)
If you want to put your programming skills to good use, why not create an Arabic popup dictionary like VerbAce, but with better integrated parser that shows all possible roots and patterns for any valid Arabic word like the Araflex web site.

I agree, but I think the softwares you already mentioned are not really integrated, it could be a hassle for non programmer to do the job in my opinion.

The idea of the integration between VerbAce & Araflex sounds nice, I wonder how many would find it useful.


Kubelek wrote:
This guy is developing one as well

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7321

Oh, I think I will check this out thoroughly, thanks for the link.

Edited by SweetMonia on 22 January 2011 at 2:02pm

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Cainntear
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 Message 5 of 8
23 January 2011 at 6:31pm | IP Logged 
I was just thinking pretty much the same thing the other day -- a "smart" dictionary that remembers what words you've been looking up and starts teaching you them. As with all software development, try to keep it as modular and portable as possible, because while a little app on the iPhone can make you a handful of coins, licensing the engine to someone with the clout to create multiple dictionaries is the way to really make money.

If other people are already doing it, just do it better!
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SweetMonia
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 Message 6 of 8
26 January 2011 at 12:04pm | IP Logged 
Yeah, I thought about making it portable so I could release a version of it on many operating systems, depending on the demand, I think I will release the first software on either Windows or the iPhone.
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Normunds
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 Message 7 of 8
29 January 2011 at 11:27am | IP Logged 
Doitsujin wrote:
I hate to break it to you, but such software already exist. You only need to combine a free SRS like Anki with the free StarDict dictionay or the semi-commercial Babylon dictionaries. (StarDict has an optional automatic lookup mode that doesn't require any key-presses.)

all is this is nice on idea level, but each language has its particularities, there are pretty limited amount of free dictionaries that could be used with stardict and their quality/size is pretty low. Of course if we limit this to one or two choice language pairs we could come up with something.

For Mandarin Chinese for example there are two freeware products that are integrated in this way. Pablo dictionary (based on open CEDICT) and Pingrid - a bit game-like interface for SRS. When you look-up a word, you can choose to add to your favorites list that in turn is linked to SRS. Automatic adding of all looked-up words I think is not a good idea. It will clutter up hopelessly your wordlist.

I think Pablo+Pingrid is pretty nice combination, still I'm using it just sometimes for fun as I cannot really force myself to use SRS in a long run. IMO it's good to "get going", to make the word "familiar", but after the most efficient would be to use it in context, be it reading or listening, to really make it stick.

Concerning mention of Arabic by other poster - with any synthetic language such as Arabic you will have the game around either mapping each form to its own translation, or mapping it in a "classical way" to the root entry. Or maybe even better providing both options.

I have thought along these lines as well, but any universal solution have to be very complex to provide for different language needs... Though probably it is possible to create an engine that you can eventually improve by adding special handling for special languages.

Probably an audio could be nice and for Chinese character based languages there should a helper for the production of the written form (note that the frequently same characters in Chinese and Japanese are written with different stroke order :-) I'm not aware of any other modern languages that use hieroglyphics or something similar; in other cases it's just more or less complex mostly phonetically based native script.

For other languages there should be two options of using the native script (for some you might even need a choice between several versions) and some "phonetic approximation" in latin script (again there might be different versions of "latinisation").

Have fun :-)
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Doitsujin
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 Message 8 of 8
29 January 2011 at 3:21pm | IP Logged 
Normunds wrote:
Concerning mention of Arabic by other poster - with any synthetic language such as Arabic you will have the game around either mapping each form to its own translation, or mapping it in a "classical way" to the root entry. Or maybe even better providing both options.


Actually, that part isn't so complicated, because there's a free Perl-based Arabic POS tagger, that can be obtained from the Linguistic Data Consortium: Buckwalter Arabic Morphological Analyzer.
Unfortunately, the author used his own transliteration system, which takes some time to getting used to.

It has already been used in a couple of Arabeyes freeware projects and for the AraFlex Arabic Morphological Analyzer web site.

Edited by Doitsujin on 29 January 2011 at 5:58pm



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