Language Learning Tools

The goal of this software is to help students learn foreign languages with the use of the Internet.

Overview

Many students use the Internet to help them master a foreign language. I am a portuguese-speaking person who has been using the Web to help me learn and improve my skills with foreign languages like english, german, spanish and french. A typical foreign language student will use the Web to improve reading and, to a lesser degree, improve writing by comparing one's writing to texts existant on the Web. To help students with these tasks, I am developing LLTOOLS (Language Learning Tools), a set of 6 tools which will help reading and writing in a foreign language.

Requirements

1 – Python > 1.5.2. It has been tested on Python 2.2 and Python 1.5.2.

2 – MySQL > 3.x

Install

1 - Unzip lltools-xx.zip

2 – Set the environment variable PYTHONPATH to the directory where you unzipped the tools

3 – Create a database on MySQL called lltools with two tables: languages and words. The DDL files ae stored on the db/ directory.

4 – Populate the database. Sorry, I cannot give you my copy of the words table. There are many free or quasi-free dictionaries on the Internet. You'll have to import it yourself into the database.

5 – edit the platform.py file stored on Lltools/Misc.

6 - Run the unit tests: alltests.py.

7 – Now, you can run the tools

Tools

1 – wordlist

Format: wordlist.py url

creates a word list from an url

2 - interlinear

Format: interlinear.py html-page language

creates an interlinear version of text

Tools in development

1 - wordbank

compiles a word bank

Format: wordbank.py wordlist language number-of-examples

2 - concordance

creates a concordance

Format: concordance.py htmlpage-url language

3 - style helper

tests if style of text is ok

Format: style-helper.py htmlpage-url language (level=academic,literary-new,literary-archaic,news,usgeneric,ukgeneric,worldgeneric)

4 - difficult words highlighter

tests which words are less used (useful to highlight difficult words)

Format: difficult-words-highlighter.py htmlpage-url language (level=academic,literary-new,literary-archaic,news,usgeneric,ukgeneric,worldgeneric)

5 - wordlist highlighter

highlights words in text according to their pertainment and classification in wordlist

Format: wordlist-highlighter.py htmlpage-url wordlist

Web Interface

Another goal of this project is to develop a web interface for some of these tools.

Visit Hyperlinear.com for a demo of the Interlinear tool

Where do I get releases ?

Releases of Lltools are available from the project download page.

Todo List

Priorities are:

1 – make the web interface work fully.(will be version 0.1.0)

2 – develop common functionality for some tools in development (wordbank,style helper, highlighter) (will be version 0.2.0)

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