FrankenTongues on Creativity Hacker

The Golem In The Shadows

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:37:06 +0000

A man may spend considerable effort searching for a solution, only to discover that he has already built one and simply forgotten.

New Road Trip, New Trial

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 09:34:48 +0000

I’m sitting in the car, waiting to begin another long road trip, and in keeping with recent practice, this will be another chance to test my hands-free learning tools. But in light of my current ALG experiment, there will have to be some changes to the plan.

Ears Don't Have Fingers

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Mon, 19 May 2025 15:32:18 +0000

While conducting my road tests recently, I had a bit of an epiphany: my Norsk reading skills went from zero to B2 level (advanced intermediate) in 3 months, but after spending a similar amount of time focused on training my ear, I’m still at A1. I think it’s time to change gears…

Looting The Battlefield

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Fri, 16 May 2025 09:22:11 +0000

I’ve been experimenting for months on different ways to convert podcast content into a form I can use in Frankie. I’ve found several solutions, but along the way, I’ve left the resulting file tree in absolute chaos. I’ve got files in a dozen directories and an equal number of formats. There are fragments of scripts and clips and tools scattered throughout the hierarchy like bodies left to rot on a medieval battlefield, but there’s also no consistency, little documentation, and worse, still no definitive process.

Well it’s time to loot those bodies, gather the useful bits into a proper plan, and bury whatever is left.

Road Trip Trials

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 13 May 2025 09:42:03 +0000

I’ve always enjoyed the peaceful thinking time afforded me by trips across the long, flat (and straight!) expanses of Canada’s prairie highway network, but as the family’s primary driver, my productivityy en route has always been limited to “thinking about stuff.” One of the dream use-cases for Frankie is to give me a second way to be productive.

So when plans formed last week to make one of those trips this week, I started scrambling. Frankie itself wasn’t quite ready, but the media files were. Could I whip up a way to test my proposed workflow without Frankie?

Modal Frank

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:13:41 +0000

I’ve been wading through the refactoring swamp on a couple of other projects lately, and it appears to be contagious. Today I decided to pull Frankie’s CLI reader apart and put it back together again. All in service of the new lesson layout.

A Deeper Think On Lesson Layout

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 10:26:22 +0000

As I continue to use Frankie in more ways and with different types of content, I’m beginning to see some friction points. Some are just a function of the limited graphics of the TUI interface I’m using at this phase of the project, but some are about the actual information layout itself. Before I start tinkering with it, I want to talk my way through it. And that means: It’s rubber duckie time again!

Packaging Lesson Plans

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:26:35 +0000

As mentioned here, I recently got some exciting features working in console mode, but now I have to get them working on my phone. Getting the new code there should be easy enough - I can just pull the git repo - but delivering the lesson content is going to be a bit more complicated.

Random Body Parts Singing Together At Last

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:36:05 +0000

FrankenTongues began with some very specific features in mind - features that I couldn’t find in other tools - and it’s taken a while to get here, but today was the day I finally got to play with two of the biggest.

Hearing is Believing

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:55:27 +0000

There are times when implementing a new feature seems daunting - when the perceived difficulty of the task at hand hangs so ominously over your future-view that you seriously question whether you’ve got the stamina to get through it. But today I heard the sweet sound of success, literally, and can finally breathe a little easier.

Missing Modes

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:42:27 +0000

As my Norwegian text skills get better, I’m increasingly annoyed that my acoustic conversational skills are not, but it’s because I still haven’t found a practice method or tool that suits me. So today I’m putting some more concrete thought into what I actually want.

Frustrating Searches Be Gone

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 19:44:15 +0000

Earlier I mentioned how frustrated I’ve been getting with lag in LingQ when I’m trying to read. It’s one thing to have occasional delays when loading a new lesson to study, but when you’re reading a novel and getting that delay for Every. Single. Sentence. you just want to pull your hair out by the roots.

Word Search

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:16:27 +0000

One language learning tool that really worked for me (for a while) was LingQ. I especially like the ability to studying language materials one sentence at a time. But as I’ve gotten more fluent, I’ve come to find the implementation increasingly frustrating.

Headline Grabber

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 03:44:42 +0000

Similar to the Ad-hoc Text problem, another technique I use for improving my Norwegian is to start each day by scanning Norsk news headlines. But can I make it even easier to use?

Hands-Free Practice

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:25:06 +0000

One of the things that inspired me to start FrankenTongues was the lack of tools I could find to use while exercising. Most systems require both your hands and your visual attention - holding a book or tapping a screen - so they’re out. Pimsleur kinda worked, but I want something at a higher language level, and I want to be able to create my own lesson content. So after taking a week off to just enjoy Frankie’s new ebook reading feature, I’m now ready to add another one. And this one’s going to be entirely hands-free.

The Context Cavalry Comes Over The Hill

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 11:51:39 +0000

Earlier I mentioned that I didn’t have the on-phone search function working yet. What that meant under the hood was that it was working in the lab but that I hadn’t pushed it to my phone to actually try it yet.

Ad-hoc Text

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:32:41 +0000

One technique I often use to improve my Norwegian is to create “study blocks”. From a few sentences to a few paragraphs, each block focuses on a specific aspect of the language I want to explore. For example, I have one that demonstrates a spectrum of common adverbial intensifiers that range from slightly (litt) to extremely (ekstremt). But after comparing the text for such a block, how do I then get it into Frankie?

Play-testing Local Translations

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 05:04:02 +0000

It’s been a month now since I last used LingQ. I didn’t actually intend to switch - it just kinda happened - which must surely count as some kind of validation. But as much as I’ve enjoyed Frankie’s lower-friction experience, it is not completely smooth. And today I begin on the next step.