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.
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.
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My first source of delay frustration was from the number of button presses LingQ was forcing me to go through just to add a new word meaning to my vocabulary. I think I counted between 6 and 12 clicks, depending on the day. (The process seems to vary depending on the server’s mood.) And making matters worse, any one of those clicks could suddenly pause for up to 10 seconds, showing everything down even more. It has frankly become exhausting.
Fortunately, FrankenTongues has recently become useable enough that I’ve been trying it as my daily reader and just imagine my delight to find that, even though this is still an early experimental app, I’m now rocketing through the text.
The first time savings comes from the fact that FrankenTongues doesn’t track word meanings for you. Tracking individual words was an important part of my early learning, when everything on the page was unfamiliar. But that external memory aid quickly becomes a crutch, and I believe that the sooner you can get rid of it, the faster you’ll progress.
The second saving comes from working with entire sentences. In LingQ, the emphasis is on word recognition, but words are slippery buggers. They change meaning constantly, depending on context. So if you’re going to look something up, look up the entire sentence. It’s faster, plus you’ll actually pay more attention to the surrounding context, which makes mental storage and recall more efficient.
The third saving comes from the fact that the app is running on your phone, not on the cloud. So the buttons are snappy! Until I get my on-phone translation trick finished, I’m still relying on a web-based translator to figure out the occasional sentence, but that will change fairly soon, I hope.
So, still miles to go before I sleep, but the road is already feeling smoother.
