I am now pretty happy with the things I set out to learn.
The next iteration of language learning tools is practiced
(see repo), which
is a much leaner program.
I combine my favourite parts of Duolingo, Quizlet and Drops to create a react-app for learning stuff, as well as learning all those things in the description.
I am in this process also discovering the best ways to learn a language using tools. To this end one of the most important goals for the tool is that it is configurable and has a low cost of change (in the end, the logical conclusion for lowering the cost of change is implementing configurability).
Thoughts on language learning:
- I want to be able to describe the world in a new language.
- But only when I'm thinking about the fact that I want that.
- I am usually thinking about how I'd like to be able to do that while I'm learning to do that.
- While I'm learning a language I'm usually in one of two places: At my desk at home or on the train to work.
- Actions 1 => Teach sentences early which enable learners to describe their immediate surroudings and generally things they are thinking of while they are learning.
- Actions 2 => I want the complexity of the things I can say to build vertically as well as horizontally. I don't just want to be able to say "I like X" for all X. I would go as far as to say that, like quality in the sand cone tradeoff model, sentence complexity must be built on before expanding horizontally. Aka: Constructions > Vocabulary. However vocabulary is necessary to make sufficient use of further constructions to feel as though my skill is advancing, so they must be balanced.
- I am not a skilled Georgian speaker, so I will start off by serving other people's lessons through this interface.
config/ has a script you can run as q create_env_configuration_script.q
. This
produces a file config/apprc
. If you then run source apprc
, it will set a bunch
of project specific environment variables so that all the parts can work together
on the same machine in a fully configurable manner.
apprc
is produced using the actual configuration file: config/cfg
.
There is an example containing all of the required variables, called
config/cfg.example
.
After a few weeks of always forgetting to load the variables, I added
. "<path to this project>/config/apprc"
to my ~/.profile
(semantically
speaking).
"Don't forget, a couple of hours of trial and error can save you several minutes
of reading the README."
- Unknown
Q (3.5) Neo4j (3.5) Yarn (1.12) Node (10.11) Kotlin (1.3)
Get UI parameters like the position of buttons on the screen and stuff from the server on data fetches. Track UI interactions. Feed data through a server-side model. Update what new visitors see based on this. Over time, the UI evolves to become more effective at getting users towards the user stories they are achieving.
Separate Q server for tracking UI interactions.
UI for submitting lesson plans - which are producers(functions which return questions) and their corresponding inputs. Completely configurable - can be used to create maths questions, vocab questions or programming questions.
Learning something for the first time is different from practicing it later. There should be different exercises for learning something for the first time and for revisiting a topic later.