Flash Card Program For Testing Vocabulary?, Flash card program? Options

[znpp]

Does anyone know of an app that works under Cacko 1.23 that would let me take an existing list I have of English phrases and their foreign equivalents, and then create a quick vocabulary test based on the text file? Sort of like a flashcard system.

The best example of a system like this is TestMe for Psion:
http://www.prosoft.force9.co.uk/series5/testme_osaris.html

znpp

[ZDevil]

I've compiled Granule for pdaXrom here: http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showt...145998&st=120&#
Developer's homepage: http://granule.sourceforge.net/

But it requires gtkmm2 and libassa. Not sure whether it will work under pdaxqtrom.

[kurochka]

toMOTko

A small Zaurus application for English speakers learning Japanese. It's a customizable flashcard program that asks words repetitively to acquire new vocabulary and memorize kanji readings/writings. GPL (v 0.1.0)

Author: Frederic Bergeron from France

[kurochka]

toMOTko

A small Zaurus application for English speakers learning Japanese. It's a customizable flashcard program that asks words repetitively to acquire new vocabulary and memorize kanji readings/writings. GPL (v 0.1.0)

Author: Frederic Bergeron

http://zaurus.palmopensource.com/index.php?more=83

On April 14th, Frederic released a new version of his program ToMOTko 0.4.2.

I tried some early versions, and they felt too alpha. I will try this one and report.

see Link


Added:

Generally, I like the new version. The only thing is that you have to create your study lists from scratch on the Zaurus itself. The format of the list file is some sort of xml. Frederic promises to implement import/export functions. I will try to make my own list on the desktop in this xml format and see what happens

Although the export function appears to be there, I don't know what it is doing. It says that the file was exported successfully but where and in what format?

Actually, I found where the lists are kept.

Its in /home/zaurus/.toMOTko/1.xml

The file is in UTF-16BE encoding with Signature

Here is an example:

CODE

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<glossary id="1" name="Legacy glossary">
<translations>
    <term id="0">
 <trans lang="en">
     <word>to go back; to return</word>
 </trans>
 <trans lang="ja">
     <word>帰る</word>
     <alt>かえる</alt>
     <comment>Enter a comment/note here.</comment>
 </trans>
    </term>
    <term id="1">
 <trans lang="en">
     <word>to go</word>
 </trans>
 <trans lang="ja">
     <word>行く</word>
     <alt>いく</alt>
 </trans>
    </term>
    <term id="2">
 <trans lang="en">
 </trans>
 <trans lang="ja">
 </trans>
    </term>
    <term id="3">
 <trans lang="en">
     <word>to listen; to hear</word>
 </trans>
 <trans lang="ja">
     <word>聞く</word>
     <alt>きく</alt>
 </trans>
    </term>
</translations>
</glossary>

Does anybody know how I can easily covert my cvs study list into this format? Is there an xml editor that would do it easily?

It will be interesting to see whether the program will be able to handle huge study lists (with thousands of items).

It would be nice to have preinstalled study lists for different levels (beginer, intermediate, advanced) or at least one or two lists for testing.

Yey! I created a study list on my desktop from an excel file for the textbook Genki I. It works!

[Frederic Bergero...]

For more details about the import/export feature, take a look at the Glossary Manager section of the Online Help (either click the circled question mark button at the top-right corner of toMOTko or consult the web site). It will tell you where the exported glossaries are located. It doesn't explain the file format though as I thought it was (mostly) self-explanatory :-)

Here is some additional information about import/export and file format :

Basically, the data of toMOTko are stored in $HOME/.toMOTko (including preferences, glossaries and markedItems, etc). When you export a glossary, what happens is a kind of copy of a glossary file from $HOME/.toMOTko to an external and visible directory (somewhere below $HOME/Documents). The import do the same operation in the opposition direction with some minor transformation (to link it properly to the destination folder). I chose to put toMOTko's data in an hidden directory because I think that most users should not be concerned about such details.

Concerning the XML format :

1) The glossary id is not important when doing an import. Leave it to "1". It may probably be omitted. toMOTko will generate a new id when performing the import and writing/copying the data into $HOME/.toMOTko directory.

2) Each term is a word entry in toMOTko. For now, only Japanese and English are supported so you better stick to "en" and "ja". Hopefully, toMOTko will support other languages in the future.

3) alt is for the furigana representation. alt stands for alternate representation. It could be a phonetic one or something else. For now, I use it only to store furigana.

4) The term id should be unique for each term and should start from 1.

5) Concerning the encoding, I think toMOTko should accept it if it's in UTF-8.

Could you please send a small example of your CSV file. I don't promise anything but if it's not too complicated, and if I have some free time, I could provide you a conversion script.

Edited:
It's funny. While I was writing my message you just mentioned that you succeeded to build a glossary file yourself using Excel. Great!

Edited again:
I've just downloaded your data file and I think it highlights at least one bug (maybe more) in the import procedure. For example, for the White day entry, when the Japanese word is left blank, the English word is reused. That should not happen. I will fix that ASAP. Also, your comment field seems wrong. I suspect that the number you put there may be a kind of identifier to group words together. If I'm right, you should probably leave the comment field empty and generate several glossary files and import all of them individually. Anyway, thanks for the data file. I will check it further later.

[kurochka]

Thank you for such a quick reply!

I will send you a cvs file but basically it is something like this:

word,furigana,kanji,comment

I.e., comma (or tab) separated.

I used Excel to make the huge study list file above.

You will see that the comments contain the lesson number. As it works now, when I start the study list it (in the Manage Glossary window) gets into alphabetical order of the English words and screws my ordering. Is there a way to leave the order the way it is in the study list or alternatively be able to order by comment?

Could you add a function to tick off all words (instead of ticking off every single one)? Or tick off all words in a selection?

I also noticed that for those words that do not have kanji/word, the alt is copied into word field. It's ok. No harm in that.

[Frederic Bergero...]

About the order of the words, I don't think it's pertinent to keep that information, is it? I think you should not care about it. Especially if you separate your huge file into smaller files (one per lesson), order should not be relevant. Having several smaller files is also more flexible to check words for study as you can check words by lessons using the Tree Pane.

A "work-around" solution would be to prefix a number before each word (something like 001, 002, 003, ...) This way, the alphabetical order will sort your words like you want. Not very elegant but it works.

[kurochka]

Thanks for your suggestions and comments, Frederic.

Yep, I guess breaking it up into smaller study lists is the way to go. As you've guessed it, the comment field indicates the lesson number from the Genki textbook.

As I understand, the file to be imported must be preformatted in the toMOTko format, correct? Does it support any other flashcard formats?

Sometimes when I close the application, it tells me that there is something wrong with permissions and it could not save the changes. I guess this is because I did not use the import function and just hand copied the study list in the hidden directory, right?

I also noticed that my selection of words for quizzes is not saved sometimes when I close the application. I have to tick off the words again after I open the program. But this is not always. This could be connected to the permissions problem above. However, I don't see where in the study list files the selection info is saved. I have not touched any other files.

I've made a separate file for the words from the first five lessons. It's still big. Here is a bug that I noticed (once), when the quiz was 13% complete, it said that I finished all the items although I have not gone through all the words. I will see if this repeats itself (it takes a while to get to 13% of this study list

I guess that your program can be used for any language (or anything else for that matter) even though it would still say English, Japanese, furigana. Furigana can be used for pronunciation. Comment field is great, since I can put examples and grammatical info about the word.

Actually, I noticed that a word ID in the list does not have to start with "0" (when I split the original file, I didn't retag the word ID for the second file). This is good news since I can just split big study lists without retagging them.


Oh, the icon is not very descriptive of what the program does. Well, I have nothing against well-bosomed ladies but still :-)

Cresho, thanks for the link. I will see if there is anything useful for me there.

I think we can get some study lists from

http://wakan.manga.cz/?page=download&lang=en

[Frederic Bergero...]

As I understand, the file to be imported must be preformatted in the toMOTko format, correct?  Does it support any other flashcard formats?

Not at the moment but I'm open to suggestions.

Sometimes when I close the application, it tells me that there is something wrong with permissions and it could not save the changes.  I guess this is because I did not use the import function and just hand copied the study list in the hidden directory, right?

Probably.

You can change the permissions manually like this :

CODE

zaurus$ cd ~/.toMOTko
zaurus$ chown zaurus.qpe your-glossary-file.xml
zaurus$ chmod 644 your-glossary-file.xml

Also, you could export your glossary file and import it back into a different folder. It's cleaner and it will set the links properly with the other files (tree.xml, marked.xml).

I also noticed that my selection of words for quizzes is not saved sometimes when I close the application.  I have to tick off the words again after I open the program.  But this is not always.  This could be connected to the permissions problem above.  However, I don't see where in the study list files the selection info is saved.  I have not touched any other files.

I'm not sure but it could be a side-effect of not importing the glossary files properly or possibly wrong id sequence for your terms. Other files like tree.xml and marked.xml use the id field for references. If the same id is used twice, this can provoke strange behavior.

If you ever want to start from scratch, close toMOTko, remove (or just rename it if you want to keep a backup) .toMOTko directory and launch toMOTko. This will create a brand new and clean .toMOTko directory. You can then import your glossary files. This reduces the risk of data corruption caused by manual manipulations.

I've made a separate file for the words from the first five lessons.  It's still big.  Here is a bug that I noticed (once), when the quiz was 13% complete, it said that I finished all the items although I have not gone through all the words.  I will see if this repeats itself (it takes a while to get to 13% of this study list

If you find a way to reproduce it systematically, send me your .toMOTko directory and the steps to trigger the bug. I didn't encounter such a bug so far with 0.4.2 and I'm using it daily.

I guess that your program can be used for any language (or anything else for that matter) even though it would still say English, Japanese, furigana.  Furigana can be used for pronunciation.  Comment field is great, since I can put examples and grammatical info about the word.

Yes, it can but it's not very clean to abuse the format like that. Also the interface should be improved to handle other languages explicitly.

Actually, I noticed that a word ID in the list does not have to start with "0" (when I split the original file, I didn't retag the word ID for the second file).  This is good news since I can just split big study lists without retagging them.

Yeah, probably it doesn't matter so much but one thing that is important is that the term id must be unique for each term in a glossary file. Also, glossary id should be unique for all the glossaries.

Oh, the icon is not very descriptive of what the program does.  Well, I have nothing against well-bosomed ladies but still :-)

I thought long time about the icon but the concept of acquiring vocabulary is rather abstract and boring. Most of such applications use icons like a book or a drawer... 詰まらないと考えた... So I imagined that a well-endowed kawaii lady would be better (more distinct and provocative ;-). There are some details about that on the website.

[kurochka]

I thought long time about the icon but the concept of acquiring vocabulary is rather abstract and boring.  Most of such applications use icons like a book or a drawer...  詰まらないと考えた...  So I imagined that a well-endowed kawaii lady would be better (more distinct and provocative ;-).  There are some details about that on the website.

I've read the explanation on the website. Fun, fun, fun! Right from the beginning, I got that MOT is a "word" from French. Je comprend le Francais en peu mais je manque la pratique. J'ai oublie beaucoup des choses du temps ou j'apprenais le Francais.

I am not even sure if what I wrote in French is comprehensible I don't have a French keyboard layout installed for accents.

[Frederic Bergero...]

I've read the explanation on the website.  Fun, fun, fun!  Right from the beginning, I got that MOT is a "word" from French.  Je comprend le Francais en peu mais je manque la pratique. J'ai oublie beaucoup des choses du temps ou j'apprenais le Francais.

I am not even sure if what I wrote in French is comprehensible   I don't have a French keyboard layout installed for accents.

Your French is not bad at all.

Thanks for the glossary file from j-flash. Would you give me the permission to put your glossary files on the website of toMOTko? This way, other people could use them. If you agree, I would also mention your "name" (kurochka or something else and/or your email?)

[kurochka]

Wow, you are fast.

Yes, all files that I put here you can post on your website. I am still improving the Genki lists so you may hold on with that one.

I've played with your icon and here is what I have come up with. I think this one is better. I made the colors richer. It is 64X64 and has a transparent background. What are the names of other pics you use in the program? Are they in the pics directory?

This post has been edited by kurochka: Apr 28 2007, 09:50 AM

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