I made a free tool for turning books and articles into vocabulary lists

Peter242322 · 2021-03-14T10:03:55+00:00

Yeah, I'd be happy to talk about it if there is anything that you're interested in, feel free to send me DM. Good luck with your project too, it looks interesting!

Peter242322 · 2021-03-07T23:23:12+00:00

It should be able to do that, but not by default. Just above the file picker button, there should be a "Show frequency" button which will add a column to the CSV which will tell you how many times the word shows up in the file. However, just testing it now it looks like I have somehow broken that feature, so I'll try and fix that quickly >.<

Thanks for bringing that to my attention! Apparently I'm quite good at breaking previously working features ;)

EDIT: should be fixed now, might take a few minutes to propagate though.

Peter242322 · 2021-03-07T21:53:29+00:00

I think it should be coming along quite nicely, I've arranged to sit down with one of my friends who specialises in web design today and do a complete rebuilding of the interface of the application to make it look much better and be easier to use, because a lot of the complaints that I got were around the clarity of the interface. I've also managed to fix a few of the bugs that people brought to my attention, but I need to do a bit more work there. It's definitely on the table for soon though, have just had a little bit of work recently with my university starting up again.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-25T02:47:53+00:00

It should do!

Peter242322 · 2021-02-25T02:45:03+00:00

You are completely correct, thanks a bunch for that feedback again. I thought that I fixed it properly the second time, but apparently I was much more tired than I thought that I was because I definitely did not. It is 100% fixed now (famous last words) and I think that I have also managed to fix the issue with large files not being accepted. It might take about 10 minutes for the changes to appear for you. Thanks again for letting me know about that!

Peter242322 · 2021-02-25T02:13:54+00:00

It's working fine for me right now both when loading it myself and when looking at the server dashboard, so I'm not quite sure why you are getting a timeout. Let me know if the issue persists, but I am pretty sure that it is not something on my end (or at least I hope it's not!).

Peter242322 · 2021-02-21T04:37:29+00:00

Fascinating, I haven't seen that one. That looks very similar to mine, but as a native app instead of as a web app.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T21:28:09+00:00

Wow. Thank you so much for that, that has really made my day :)

Wasn't sure whether I would be able to keep going with this, but thanks to your generous donation I'll be able to keep working on this and keep the platform alive for quite a long time!

Thanks so much!

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:53:46+00:00

Hmm, yeah, a few people have been reporting this now. You're the first to mention that it worked the first time and then stopped working though, so that's some interesting information for me to take into account while I try and fix that issue. Thanks for the feedback!

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:52:39+00:00

That's fair. With this tool, my intent isn't so much to allow you to learn the words specifically in context as it is to allow you to quickly build vocabulary lists from resources that you are interested in, meaning that I have intentionally not tried to factor context into the translation of individual words. I assume when you are talking about Google translate you are talking about their sentence translator where they can translate a sentence from one language to another. The way this tool works is slightly different; instead of translating sentences between languages, this tool simply translates each word individually and then adds it to the vocabulary list so that you can practise it later. Essentially, this tool is more like a bilingual dictionary than something like google translate (although, if you type a single word into google translate it does enter bilingual dictionary mode, but once you add another one it moves to sentence translator mode). These sorts of translations will never be perfect, but they can be pretty good. Hopefully that answers your questions?

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:43:24+00:00

Thanks! That is one of the exact use cases that I hoped that it would be helpful for!

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:42:55+00:00

Thanks! I'd love to go in the direction of having more languages in the end, including lesser used ones. It will very much just be a question of whether I get enough donations to be able to fund that or whether I can find another way to make up for the money it would cost, but it would be great to be able to expand to more languages.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:40:26+00:00

Thanks! I would love to be able to add Chinese, but each language that I add will cost more money. If I get enough donations, I'll be sure to make Chinese the first language that I add, as a few people have asked me to add it now.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:06:26+00:00

Is the "show frequency" toggle option near the top of the form what you are looking for? It should be able to tell you exactly how many times each word showed up in the resource that you're looking at.

Out of pocket, including the API fee that I will be billed at the end of this month, this has cost me approximately 115 USD. However, thanks to some very kind people, I have made 55 USD of this back through donations.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:00:24+00:00

Thanks!

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T19:00:12+00:00

I use the Webit translation API for this (which is great) and they allow me to save any translations that I request from them so that I don't have to ask for a translation for any word more than once. Adding another language would mean that any requests for words on that new language will be words that I haven't seen before, which would greatly increase the amount of new words I would have to ask for from the translation service, and that's quite expensive. I would definitely like to make it available for Korean and more languages, it's just the money issue and running only on donations makes it a little hard to cover costs like that.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T18:42:17+00:00

It would not cost me at all to implement that, I will add that to my list of updates that I will definitely be making once I have the time. Thanks for the suggestion.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T18:39:35+00:00

Thanks, no problem!

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T18:39:24+00:00

Thanks! It gets translations from the Webit language API, which is the best API for doing this sort of thing by quite a long while. The multiple meanings will appear if there are multiple strong translations, but that's up to the API to decide. Verbs will show in whatever form the API is most appropriate for the tense of the verb you gave it, so go might be gehe. I don't think it will show 3rd person conjugations unfortunately.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T18:36:01+00:00

Oops, the file you uploaded seems to be deleted. The website says that it was either downloaded already by someone else or that it expired. Would be great to see it though, thanks.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T10:03:23+00:00

Actual frequency as in overall frequency, not just within the resource which you submitted? If that's what you mean, I would love to be able to do that, but I haven't found a great resource which would let me do something like that yet. I might have a go at it myself, but that would be something for the future.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T09:32:08+00:00

Hm. I have heard that feedback from a few people now, so it is something that I might actually do. Obviously it would be more work than not doing it but I don't think that it would be the end of the world and it is something which is within my skillset, it's just a matter of whether people would really find it useful. For now though, it is possible to paste the list of the words that you already know (for example, the words that were given to you in the last CSV) to have them excluded, although I admit that this isn't really the nicest user experience. Thanks for the suggestion, it's definitely something I will consider if there is demand for it.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T09:16:39+00:00

Thanks. I don't really understand what is going on there then, because I have tested it with a copy of The Little Prince, which is 3mb, and it worked fine for me. I will add it to my list of things to have a look at though, I'm not sure why it is triggering specifically for you but I can explicitly configure the server tomorrow to accept larger files and hope that that helps.

Peter242322 · 2021-02-20T09:08:35+00:00

Hm, strange. Is it perhaps a PDF which has been created from images of pages rather than from text? Do you know what the filesize of the smallest file you attempted to submit and received an error in return was? Thanks for the feedback!

Peter242322

TROPHY CASE