Re: LogFlash and LESSY (!)

[Richard Kennaway <jrk@SYS.UEA.AC.UK>]

(Still crossposted to conlang and lojban; apologies to those receiving it
twice, but it does seem relevant to both.)

Lojbab writes:
>Examples are Russian "tut",
>"zdec'" both meaning "here", used almost identically.  How do I come up
>with a distinct keyword?

With FlashCards, I deal with synonyms by allowing multiple keywords on
either side of a card:

Russian    aux.Russ.    English    aux.Eng.
tut|zdec                here

When Russian is to be displayed, both "tut" and "zdec" are displayed, and
the expected answer is "here".  When English is displayed, either "tut" or
"zdec" will be accepted as an answer.

This may not be the best way.  It might be better in Recog mode to display
the flashcard twice, once showing "tut" and once showing "zdec", in both
cases expecting "here" as the answer.  In fact, that seems so much better
that I think I'll implement it in the next version.

In the case of not-so-near synonyms that one wants to distinguish, the
auxiliary fields are useful:

Dutch     aux. Dutch    English   aux.English
sluiten                 close     (vb.  ...a door)
besluiten               close     (vb.  ...a meeting)

or one might add alternative keywords which together narrow down the
intended meaning:

Dutch     aux. Dutch    English            aux.English
sluiten                 close|shut         (vb.  ...a door)
besluiten               close|conclude     (vb.  ...a meeting)

>I also faced the problem that I was still learning Russian declensions.
>It is fine to add in the infinitive of the verb, but then you need the
>nth person singular/plural, and for the nouns (especially the irregular ones

Dutch doesn't have that problem. :-)

Learning declensions and conjugations is something that none of our current
tools is well suited for.  If anyone wants to start work on a LESSY, this
looks like a promising area.

Is there anyone here who knows anything about the current state of the art
in computer-aided language learning?

___
\X/ Richard Kennaway, jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk, http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
    School of Information Systems, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.