Welcome!

Linguado's a language learning terminal program, similar to duolingo. It allows users to practice foreign languages by:

Translating sentences;
Transcribing what they hear;
Choosing one or multiple options to provide an answer to a question;

Lessons and courses

Linguado requires lessons and courses to be present on the ~/.linguado directory in order to work.

Lessons are just ruby code, and they inherit from the Lesson class:

require 'linguado'

include Linguado

class BasicsI < Lesson
  def initialize
    super course: 'German', language: 'de-DE', name: 'Basics I' 
    
    ask_to write: 'hallo'
    ask_to choose: '? katze', answer: 'die', wrong: ['das', 'der']
    ask_to translate: 'ich bin fröhlich', answers: ['I am happy', 'I am cheerful']
    ask_to select: 'hallo', answers: ['hi', 'hello'], wrong: ['goodbye']
  end
end

Same thing happens with courses, which inherit from the Course class:

require 'linguado'
require '~/.linguado/basics_i.rb'
require '~/.linguado/basics_ii.rb'
require '~/.linguado/greetings.rb'
require '~/.linguado/phrases.rb'

include Linguado

class German < Course
  def initialize
    super name: 'German'

    topic 'Basics I', lesson: BasicsI.new

    topic 'Greetings', lesson: Greetings.new, depends_upon: 'Basics I'

    topic 'Basics II', lesson: BasicsII.new, depends_upon: 'Greetings'
    topic 'Phrases', lesson: Phrases.new, depends_upon: 'Greetings'
  end
end

Courses' filenames should end in _course.rb in order to be recognized.

Word policies

If you'd like to give your users some leeway on the ortography of words, allowing them to make typos if they don't differ too much from the correct answer, you can use the WordPolicy class. Word policies accept the following parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
levenshtein_distance_allowed	integer	Levenshtein distance tolerated between the correct word and the word the user wrote
exceptions	array	List of words that can't be written any other way (useful for short words that you want to make sure the user gets right)
condition	lambda	A lambda accepting a string for a word and returning a boolean. Use it to define conditions for the word policy to apply if you need more control

Every lesson can have multiple word policies and they're declared on the constructor:

class BasicsI < Lesson
  def initialize
    # we'll allow a deviation of 2 characters for most words:
    general_word_policy = WordPolicy.new levenshtein_distance_allowed: 2

    # the word 'ein' can have a typo, like 'eni' for instance
    # but not be mistaken with 'einen' or 'eine':
    ein_word_policy = WordPolicy.new condition: lambda { |word| word == 'ein' },
      exceptions: ['einen', 'eine'], 
      levenshtein_distance_allowed: 2

    super course: 'German', 
      language: 'de-DE', 
      name: 'Basics I', 
      word_policies: [general_word_policy, ein_word_policy]

    ask_to write: 'es ist ein hund'
  end
end

Installation

Install the non-ruby dependencies libsqlite3-dev, libttspico-utils and sox on your system. In debian-based systems this can be done with:

$ sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev libttspico-utils sox

Install the ruby dependencies:

$ bundle install

Running

$ bundle exec linguado