This project aims to be a supplement to your language learning journey. Its main goal is to speed up the mundane processes that one can find while learning a new language. These includes, looking up a word, searching for corresponding images, finding a recording, and so on. These tasks can take quite a lot of time if done manually. The project automates almost any part that does not fundamentally require human action.
The book Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner was the main inspiration of this project. You will notice that virtually every design choice was made according to this book. It is advised to have read this book or at least the Toolbox chapter to fully appreciate this work. Depending on your use case, the official app might be more suited to you. However, If any of these describes you, then you might be more interested into my own implementation :
- Learning a Language that the official app does not support
- Prefer to work with the Anki ecosystem
- Short on money
Another salient characteristics of this work is the use of state-of-the-art natural language understanding methods to generate content (recordings, translation, etc.) that replaces human-made content when the latter is not readily available or well structured. While the effect of using computer-generated content as reference to your own learning has not been largely studied (or my googling and research skill clearly needs some sharpening), it is still paramount to remember that machine prediction is not perfectly accurate. Consequently, whenever human-made content is available, it is preferred to the machine-made content.
- Vocabulary, Pronunciation, Fill-in-the-blank sentences
- Image Lookup
- Dictionary Translation
- Machine Translation
- Word Usage, Pronunciation, IPA
- Text-to-speech
- Abstract definitions
- Syntax sentences
- Machine transliteration
Even though it is stated that this tool is a supplement to language learning, it is possible that it might be confused with a do-it-all-for-you language learning app. It is not the case. Most of the effort will still have to come from you (until brains can be plugged into computers). The reader is invited to refer to other sources for language learning in the general sense. This tool is made solely for the purpose of automating flashcards creation. The relevance or justification of a flashcard to learn a specific aspect of a language has to be inferred from the reader's judgement.
This program uses Azure as the backbone for machine translation, image look up text-to-speech functionalities. You can use these services for free up to 100$ if you are a student. The services remains free if you do not go over your quota. Please refer to their documentation in order to get your API keys.
The process might loosely look like this :
- Create an account
- Enter payment details
- Create service
- Get the API key
You will need the following services :
- Speech
- Translator
- Bing Search
Once you have set up these services, create a config.ini file :
touch config.iniAnd fill in your credentials. These can be found under the "Keys and Endpoint" section under "Resource Management"
[speech]
key=...
location=...
endpoint=...
[image]
key=...
location=...
endpoint=...
[translator]
key=...
location=...
endpoint=...You will need the following :
You will find tutorial on how to install each of these in their respective documentation. Once you have gathered all of the above, you will need the dependencies :
pip install -r requirements.txtYou will also need this package
sudo apt install ffmpegNow you may use the program.
- Open Anki
- Download the repo
git clone https://github.com/truvaking/ForeignLanguageCompanion.git
- Go into the repo root directory
cd ForeignLanguageCompanion
- Make the shell script executabe
chmod +x ./start.sh- Run it.
./start.sh- On your browser, go to this url : http://127.0.0.1:5000/
That's it! Now choose whichever type of card you want to create and fill in the blank, click buttons as you go.
