Additional writing practice

[Cifi]

Καλημέρα (I actually typed this myself )

I'm trying to set up some additional writing practice material for myself, similar to Duolingo's "type what you hear" exercises.

It works reasonably well, but as of now I only found TTS in Greek to generate audio files and save them locally, so it's quite time consuming to add more words/sentences.

I'm still looking around for alternatives offering something like TTS (text to speech) "on the fly", but I guess it's hard to find for free, so I'll probably stick with the current way and add new words and sentences slowly one by one.

It is forgiving with respect to case and punctuation (just like Duolingo), but requires correct accent marks because I prefer to learn them right away.

I didn't put much effort in making it look nice, and there are some quirks in usability yet, e.g. the audio should be played before you start typing. Once you start typing and then click the audio, it will submit what you've written so far (no longer an issue).

It might also benefit from some filtering options at a later stage once the list grows, or I could split it into different subsets. For now, it limits to a random subset of ten items.

I uploaded it to a free web page:

http://cifi77.bplaced.net/ (no ads, but SSL encryption is not supported)

Or you can download it and test it locally if you prefer: http://cifi77.bplaced.net/greek.zip

Please notify me in case there are any errors, and I'll fix them asap. I copied and pasted most of it, but managed to misspell ψωμί as ψομί again, which I only corrected after [mention]O.Zoe[/mention] made me aware of it in another thread.

Audio is generated by freetts.com, images are from pixabay.

[Zimozie]

Καλημέρα (I actually typed this myself )

I'm trying to set up some additional writing practice material for myself, similar to Duolingo's "type what you hear" exercises.

It works reasonably well, but as of now I only found TTS in Greek to generate audio files and save them locally, so it's quite time consuming to add more words/sentences.

I'm still looking around for alternatives offering something like TTS (text to speech) "on the fly", but I guess it's hard to find for free, so I'll probably stick with the current way and add new words and sentences slowly one by one.

It is forgiving with respect to case and puncuation (just like Duolingo), but requires correct accent marks because I prefer to learn them right away.

I didn't put much effort in making it look nice, and there are some quirks in usability yet, e.g. the audio shoud be played before you start typing. Once you start typing and then click the audio, it will submit what you've written so far.

It might also benefit from some filtering options at a later stage once the list grows, or I could split it into different subsets. For now, it limits to a random subset of ten items.

I uploaded it to a free webspace:

http://cifi77.bplaced.net/ (no ads, but SSL encryption is not supported)

Or you can download it and test it locally if you prefer: http://cifi77.bplaced.net/greek.zip

Please notify me in case there are any errors, and I'll fix them asap. I copied and pasted most of it, but managed to mispell ψωμί as ψομί again, which I only corrected after @O.Zoe made me aware of it in another thread.

Audio is generated by freetts.com, images are from pixabay.

Ευχαριστώ πολύ! I tested it. Are you planning to add all the words from the Duolingo Greek course? That would be great but also an arduous task.

A few misspellings: punctuation, should, webspace -> web page?, and misspell

Overall, thank you for this post.

[Cifi]

Thanks for your corrections. Actually I am not sure how far I'm going to take this. I made it to familiarise with the Greek alphabet, which is still very hard for me. I'll have to see how helpful it will be on my learning journey beyond that.

[Cifi]

I'd actually like to continue, but I could definitely need some help with this task, especially with copying all the English and Greek translations from the lessons.

I started with Food, the lesson in the first section I'm currently working on, and came up with this (not complete yet), which is a reasonable good format to create an exercise from it.

(list moved to a Google spreadsheet)

If someone was willing to help and start the same for other lessons, it would be very much appreciated.

Edit: it seems to be quite a lot, and I am not halfway through the lesson yet. We would probably have to devide it into several exercises per lesson.

Edit 2: The list of words and sentences got too long, so I decided to transfer it too Google. It's a horrible lot of work, but I hope to get at least the first unit done.

[Cifi]

I've updated it with maybe half of the vocabulary (nouns and sentences, but the latter are commented out so they won't show yet) from skill 1.10 food. It got really large already, and as I plan to cover at least the first unit (tower), I should probably store it in a database rather than in a client-side java script.

This might also allow features like repeating words one has previously misspelled, or those that haven't been practised recently.

[duome]

Here's one of the hidden treasures of duome for you:

https://duome.eu/practice/el - practice reading greek sentences
https://duome.eu/practice/type/el - practice typing greek words

Hot keys are mostly the same as those used by Duolingo:

- reveal translation
- hide translation
space - speak
shift+space - speak slowly
ctrl+space - speak the highlighted or hidden word
enter - submit answer / proceed to next sentence

It's possible to use it completely without a mouse - hit enter to check your input, hit enter once more to submit your corrected input or proceed to next sentence.

It's aware of the accents, doesn't consider them as errors, but autocorrects your input if the only mistake was an accented letter.

It does not allow any misprints though.

It would really be a treasure if Duolingo didn't get rid of dictionaries; without them some of the collections are fairly limited - Greek only has around 600 sentences at the moment. There will be more, but it's a very long and a totally random process.

Greek pronunciation is very synthetic, but at least it's there.

[Cifi]

Here's one of the hidden treasures of duome for you:

https://duome.eu/practice/el - practice reading greek sentences
https://duome.eu/practice/type/it - practice typing greek words

Really awesome, thank you so much! (The second link points to Italian, but can easily be changed to Greek by changing the language code to "el").

To some extent beyond my current level as I'm still stuck in the first unit, so there are lots of words I haven't learned yet.

It's also great to learn about responsivevoice.org, this is the kind of TTS service I originally had been looking for without success.

[Cifi]

[mention]duome[/mention]: Btw, I tried the typing practice on my phones (two devices, both Android) yesterday, but only saw very limited parts of the screen and wasn't able to zoom out to access the input fields or buttons. Just in case there happens to be an easy fix for this...

Screenshot:

Screenshot_20220618_115322_com.android.chrome.jpg (72.48 KiB) Viewed 561 times

[Cifi]

I finally managed to rewrite this, http://cifi77.bplaced.net/ can now be filtered by Duolingo lesson plus some additional options.

Before I'll add more content, I'll check if I can include audio from responsivevoice.org, which would facilitate adding new material.

The skill with most material currently is 1.10 food, the others are really rudimentary.

[Corinnebelle]

[mention]duome[/mention] So we just change the language code and we can get more languages? Doesn't work for Hebrew, the program is there, but won't play. But this is a good tool for other languages.

[duome]

@duome So we just change the language code and we can get more languages? Doesn't work for Hebrew, the program is there, but won't play. But this is a good tool for other languages.

Yes, when it's something like https://duome.eu/practice/he - you can see how many sentences are there in the collection for this particular language (some have quite a lot, some very few); the sound isn't there for hebrew, unfortunately - it's currently unsupported by responsivevoice, so there's nothing I could do at the moment, unless I discover another voice engine (like google translate) that works across all platforms

I also made a simplified version of this for our forum to use it with a [voice=it]...[/voice] bbcode qualcosa di particolare and luo-ning improved it to include a google translate link and a play/pause button - this does not depend on responsivevoice, but it doesn't support hebrew either; anyway, it might be a good tool as well to use it within the forums when we try to help someone , an alternative to external resources to help keep our visitors in (if we want more engagement for newcomers).

[Τζιλιαν]

[mention]Cifi[/mention]
Such a lot of work you've put into this. It's something I will no doubt come back to time and again.
Thank you.

[Cifi]

@Cifi
Such a lot of work you've put into this. It's something I will no doubt come back to time and again.
Thank you.

Thanks for your kind words, Τζιλιαν. Now I actually wonder if anyone would need it, with the Duome typing exercises in place plus Duolingo's option of typing instead of clicking tiles (I'm usually using the app, so I almost forgot about that feature).

I'm happy with it nevertheless since I changed it so that it's not just random, but those that I had previously wrong would be repeated more often, and those that I hadn't practised lately (I've implemented this only for myself as of now, so anonymous users would still get a random choice).

It's also great to find out that I am not the only one trying to learn Greek around here!

[Corinnebelle]

[mention]duome[/mention] I heard Google now has TTS for Hebrew.

It doesn't produce sound for me in it or el. Should it?

I can still utilize [this] without sound, I just click reveal translation, and then it gives me the English and I translate that. It does seem like the Hebrew is on the wrong side of the question if the word you should type is the last one in the sentence. It should be on the right not the left.

Is there a shortcut for skipping a sentence if you don't know it?

Is there an option to reveal the answer if you don't know to learn from it? Since I can't hear it.

The sentences are handy for extra typing or writing practice if one wants to copy them down.

[Cifi]

I didn't get anywhere with responsivevoice.org yet, and I doubt I will

But [mention]duome[/mention]'s post gave me the idea that I might optionally include translations without a local (handmade) audio, providing a link to google translate instead, so you still can listen to it. No ideal solution, but it would boost the number of items I can practise.

[duome]

It doesn't produce sound for me in it or el. Should it?

I guess responsivevoice may have its own issues - it needs an API key and even though I do have one, yesterday it didn't work with a key, yet it worked just fine without it (and today it seems to be the opposite).

Is there a shortcut for skipping a sentence if you don't know it?

Just refresh the page...

Is there an option to reveal the answer if you don't know to learn from it? Since I can't hear it.

There will be )

[Corinnebelle]

[mention]duome[/mention]

Is it possible to enter user created decks into that program you have and have them accessible from Duome? I know there are decks already for Duolingo words, but they usually have the whole tree in it. What would be nice would be to have decks for each skill, so it is more bite sized. If the dictionary was still here I suppose they could have been autogenerated, but I think we will have to put them in by hand.

I started this since the dictionary disappeared.

[duome]

https://duome.eu/practice/it/word/cielo - this might be what you're looking for, we just need an option for users to bookmark something, be it individual words or entire skills

[Corinnebelle]

https://duome.eu/practice/it/word/cielo - this might be what you're looking for, we just need an option for users to bookmark something, be it individual words or entire skills

Sounds good!

[Cifi]

Now, finally, I actually managed to get audio from reponsivevoice included, so there are a lot more exercises available at http://cifi77.bplaced.net/ (and I notice that I am getting better, slowly but steadily).