2010 03 09
After a long time in the making: here it is, the new Swedish-German vocabulary trainer.
While the first version was basically just a dictionary containing my own private and rather incomplete collection of vocabulary entries, I have now added vocabulary training functionality. Some of the features include:
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User registration (done with django-registration)
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Classification of vocabulary entries by three levels (basic, advanced, special vocabulary) and by tags.
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The user can add arbitrary cards to his favorites list (from the search results or during training).
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Flexible selection of cards to be trained:
- Level
- Favorites
- Tags
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Cards with lowest score or cards that have not been trained for the longest time
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The training scheme is based on the concept of “vocabulary stacks”.
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During training, each vocabulary card is assigned a score according to how well the user remembered the card.
Users should register an account to use the training features, because then the ...
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2008 07 24
This word cloud is based on the text of my “about” page and was done using the wonderful wordle application.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater
prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with
different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use
however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
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2008 04 21
As I wrote in my previous post, I’m currently busy learning Swedish. One result of this endeavour is an ever growing collection of swedish words in my vocabulary program. And because there is no really usable online dictionary for swedish and german, I decided to put my collection online, in the form of a very simple web application.
The dictionary is of course by no means comprehensive - it’s just my private collection of words and expressions. I tried to follow some rules when entering the words, and I plan on extending the dictionary as my learning progresses (and I read more books).
There’s exactly one feature: searching for words. The search term is matched against all swedish and german words in the dictionary. The results are shown in a table. The whole thing is somewhat unnecessarily AJAX-powered (using jQuery).
As always, it was fun to develop ...
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2008 02 01
The probably most important activity during language acquisition is listening to and speaking in the language. There’s just no substitute for that if you want to become a fluent speaker yourself.
That means: you will not be able to learn a foreign language by reading alone. But it can be very effective. If you enjoy reading as much as I do, all you need is a basic vocabulary and an understandig of the main grammatical concepts of the language. Then find a book you know you will like. In my case, it’s “Innan Frosten” (“Before the Frost“) by Henning Mankell. Armed with a dictionary and some means to collect newly learned words, just delve in and start reading.
In the beginning, it may be tedious (ok: it will). But soon you’ll realize that this works astonishingly well. Some of the reasons are:
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