Psittacus: FOSS duolingo clone

[pumaconcolor]

Hi everyone!

So I've been working for more than a year on an free and open-source (FOSS) "duolingo clone" as a side project.

During March 2022, I posted a link to it on a thread on the old duolingo forums, just before they got sunset .

Now I wanted to share here the updates, as I'm searching for people who want to collaborate in their free time on the project, either by crafting lessons in their native languages and testing out the software, or, for the technically inclined, by submitting a pull request to the repo and helping out with the code.

Some features that are currently supported:

• can work fully offline
• editing/storing/playing lesson files
• keyboard or buttons for input
• audio playback
• hover-over-the-word definitions
• spaced repetition strategies

Some exciting experimental features:

• automatic sentence-mining and generation of lessons from a language corpus (currently, as a separate command line utility)

The website:
https://psittacus.eu.pythonanywhere.com/

(Please don't expect anything nearly as polished or as complete as the real duolingo, there's a reason I'm asking for help ...)

The repo:
https://github.com/aiman-al-masoud/psittacus

(And yes, the name is "Psittacus" also for a reason ...)
Thank you for reading!

[RickyYC]

Great. But is it a open source lang software or just a real copy of duolingo (include its content)? Really sure the "duolingo" software is a business software.

I realy want to join a open source language project since duolingo remove its tree. I've create a trial repo and make some templates using Handlebars just like anki to help somebody to make courses using json. I think it is some kind terrible since I am not a frontend programmer.

[pumaconcolor]

Hi, thanks for your reply!

Technically speaking, Psittacus is completely different from Duolingo. So no, they can't share content. I called it a "Duolingo clone" here just as you may call Mastodon an open-source "Facebook clone", only to hint at its main purpose.

The json-based format for lessons accepted by Psittacus is detailed in the readme.

There isn't anything out there yet, except for a few Italian lessons I made for it as a test, available in the "Download Lessons" section of the site. The idea was also that custom lessons could be generated automatically in this json format (using offline or online translation and TTS APIs) and a corpus of sentences provided by the user.

Hope that answers the question!

I've create a trial repo and make some templates using Handlebars just like anki to help somebody to make courses using json.

PS: I'm not particularly good at front-end either, hahah. Just looked up your repo.

I realy want to join a open source language project since duolingo remove its tree

PS2: hadn't been using Duo for a while, so I had to look this up; now I realize what you mean by the tree being removed. I'm also frustrated by this constant change of styles (like now it seems you can't even use the keyboard even on the website anymore?). And I believe this problem (the relentless change of experience despite of what users might think or want) could be at least mitigated by an open-source platform.

[RickyYC]

Actually that repo is private, so the repo you checked is my french word template.
That private repo use only html, js, css and very messy, the purpose is to run at github.io. But now I want to try move it to node.js. If I moved the minial trial to node.js, I will publicate it to see what can help to Psittacus, then try to migrate to Psittacus.
The effort I've done is to load template to iframe to simulate the anki template.
In anki they allow custom template so they don't care about the language, you can make some specific template for specific languages.

Json is great. I use json (in that private trial repo) to load courses. If you check LibreLingo, they use YAML too. But this project does not support non-Latin chars or letters currently.

Duolingo removed its keyboard support on low level courses (I think lower than level 4, they use word bank instead of typing with keyboard), which means you cannot use keyboard on website, which is disappointed. They does not care about the minority.

[Corinnebelle]

@pumaconcolor Cool! I remember another language program someone was making that was advertised on Duolingo too.

[buho]

@pumaconcolor Cool! I remember another language program someone was making that was advertised on Duolingo too.

Librelingo?

[Corinnebelle]

@pumaconcolor Cool! I remember another language program someone was making that was advertised on Duolingo too.

Librelingo?

I don't think so, unless they changed the pictures in the layout.