How to download Yandex.slovari only through design

In this article I will talk about how, due to simple redesign, I could help in the study of foreign languages. No, it does not have to enter the 25th frame or Ilona Dovydova’s method. It is enough just to work a little on the logic and interface, everything else is already there.

In the article I will talk about English as the most popular and relevant for IT people, but the same principles apply to the study of virtually any other foreign language.

To begin with, a small lyrical digression about how a foreign language can be learned at all. If you are not interested - motivate four headings below the title.

The most important thing you need to learn a foreign language is desire. And it’s not such a desire that they say “now, it’s not bad to learn a language,” but such that: “I will learn a language and I can, at last, calmly read books in English, watch TV shows without translation and not fall into a stupor when communicating with foreigners". The main difference between these two desires is a clear understanding of the answer to the question: "Why do you need to learn the language at all?". Without this understanding it is better not to even take up the study.
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Then everything is simple: you need to learn grammar and build vocabulary. But there is a trick: to learn grammar from books, going paragraph by paragraph is ineffective, but for most it is simply impossible. This is due to the fact that, as one of my familiar linguists says, language is not mathematics - it is kung fu. One may read about the techniques as much as necessary, but there will be more sense from one workout than from the year of reading manuals. Also with language. Want to learn to speak - speak. Read - read. Write - write.

The same situation with the vocabulary. Learning words in a thick dictionary is useless and even harmful. Since after some time, everything gets bored due to the fact that there will be no sense, and the study will once again be abandoned. It is much more effective to take one sentence, read it, write out all unfamiliar words, watch their translation and read it again. If the sentence is incomprehensible to some grammatical structure - see it in the first or in the textbook (for this purpose, the textbooks of Murphy are well suited). Ideally, after a lot of words have accumulated, it would be nice to run around before bedtime to fix them in your memory, since it is much more effective to do it in fresh tracks.

Since I ’m not yet applying for a grammar reference book, in this article I will consider only the interface for vocabulary replenishment. Let's go to the interface planning.

Usage scenario

Consider the scenario on the example of Oleg's character. Oleg knows English at a level that allows reading technical literature, but no more. It is difficult for him to read long texts and, moreover, to compile sentences, so he is lazy to read untranslated books and blogs, waiting for the Russian-language version. This adversely affects the quantity and quality of the information he receives, as well as the speed with which it is obtained.

Oleg understands this, and now he decided to force himself to read only foreign resources.

He has a plugin installed, I ndeks.slovari, which allows you to view the translation of any word by hovering the cursor on it, but having looked at the translation of the word, Oleg immediately forgets it and therefore the reading skill is growing very slowly.

That was until Oleg updated the plugin to version 3.0, in which it was possible to save words of interest and repeat them in the evening before going to bed. Now Oleg, seeing the unfamiliar word and translating it, simply indicates that this word should be repeated in the evening. If he frequently asks for the same word, then it is added to the list for repetition automatically.

During the day, Oleg recruited a list of 10-30 words. In the evening, over a cup of tea (a glass of beer, jamb of marijuana , enter the necessary ________________ ) it opens the page of the words of the dictionary to quickly run through the words that caused the difficulty. Words are arranged in a list and for each word it is proposed to enter a translation. You can drive your own translation of the word or skip it, see the translation.

If the word is guessed, it disappears from the list for repetition until Oleg stumbles over it again. If the word is not guessed or Oleg looked at the translation, then it will remain in the list until the next day.

You can also look at the words not in the list, but in the context of the sentences in which they were used. This is an additional hint for memory and a reason to repeat the constructions again.

During the night, new information is absorbed and in the morning Oleg's vocabulary is increasing. So, day after day, Oleg improves skill, thanks to which his price as a specialist grows and in general it becomes easier to live. He is very happy that I had such a wonderful plugin.

What should be able to interface

So, the interface should allow:

1. Quickly translate a word;
2. Take a test on new words for the day or see their translation;
3. View a list of words in the context of sentences.

WFD (field resources)

In fact, I already have almost everything to implement this functionality. Need to finish quite a bit.

There is a browser plugin that allows you to quickly translate a word on a hover with a delay (or double-click without delay).

There are also notebooks in which you can store a list of words. By themselves, they are practically useless, since so many words accumulate there very quickly that it turns out to be one huge dump. And it makes no sense to use such a self-made “thick dictionary” - it’s impossible to repeat the words (because there are too many of them), and using it for translation is not convenient, as it’s much faster to find a word through a search. The ability to have different notebooks does not help either, since they need to be switched manually and therefore the words are constantly saved in the wrong notebook.

There are tests that allow you to test yourself on the knowledge of words. But I also don’t see any sense in them now, since the words are randomly caught there, which does not give a particular advantage in learning.

So, there is one relatively useful tool (translation of words) and two mostly stupid ones. By mixing them (but without stirring), you can get one mega-useful service.

Now, the code is more or less described, you can begin to visualize the interface. I will take the standard interfaces as a basis for I ndex.slovarey (also as an almost free resource).

Interfaces

The interface of the translator plugin will not change much. Only one more pseudo-link will be added to the bubble to add a word to the list for repetition:


Well, in the drop-down by clicking on the icon of the plug-in menu, add the item "repeat words", which will lead to a page with a list of words.

The word repetition widget will eat the place of two stupid blocks: a random word in all languages ​​and a random word test.


The variant with the repetition of individual words with minimal changes in the layout will look like this:


And the tab with the words inside the sentences like this:


That's all. Very few changes, but the benefits are much more.

Benefits for parties

Well, for the user, the benefit is obvious: learning new words has become easier than ever. But for Ndeks I have a couple of buns: even more respect for one more convenient service and the daily visits of users who improve their English (and you can, after all, show targeted ads).

Conclusion

In this article I, albeit in a simplified way, showed how it is possible to assemble from the existing useless parts something useful with only a small change in the interface and logic. The ratio of benefits / costs of this method is very high.

Of course, the solution can be developed further, and another interface can be added for convenient translation of words from printed literature, but this is already beyond the scope of the article.

Thank you all for your attention, and have a nice Friday.