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, 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!
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.
The AI translations are almost always wrong in some way (at least, in Norwegian) and many of the crowd-sourced translations were even more baffling. I’ve also found it to be excruciatingly slow at times, largely because it is constantly trying to access the Internet, even when it’s just trying to open a lesson.
So one of the big questions I wrestled with in the early design was: If I’m not allowing myself constant net access, how can I learn the meaning of the new words I encounter? Sure, I’ve got a dictionary app installed, and that does have its place, but I’ve found an even more powerful source: native authors.
See, authors tend to use the same words over and over. Sometimes in long clunky sentences and other times in short, snappy ones. But more often than any AI bot or random student on the Internet, they tend to use them correctly. With subtlety, even. So most times, all I need to help me figure out the meaning of a new word is to see it used in context a few times.
And that’s where the Word Search tool comes in.
When I’m reading a sentence, I can click on any word in it and immediately see dozens of other sentences that word is used in. Not just in the current book, and not just in other works by the same author, but in all the books loaded into the app. The example sentences are sorted by order of complexity, so the easier ones come first. In practice, I only need to look at two of three of these before I’ve got a pretty good sense of what it means. And compared to Internet lookups and AI translations, it’s lightning fast.
The search tool has been working for a couple of weeks now in the CLI interface, but not in the TUI, so I’ve only been able to test it on my laptop. Now that I have a partial TUI running on my phone, its time to take it for a real spin and see if this way of acquiring new words really will work.
I ran into some headaches with the Python Textual library, so I haven’t got it functional yet, but the dialog is there, it opens when I invoke it and goes away when I dismiss it. It even displays some convenient “Lorem ipsum” sentences, but it’s ugly as sin and hard to look at. Tomorrow I’ll spend some time making it look a bit less dog-humped, and then I’ll hook up the actual search results and see how she handles in the corners.
