Flash Cards in Python (Shallow Thoughts)

Flash Cards in Python

I'm taking an online Spanish class. My mom talked me into it -- she and I both periodically try to learn Spanish, then forget it again because we don't practice enough. The hope is that if we're both taking the same class, we'll converse with each other by email en Español, have more fun and learn better.

I have no particular talent for (non-computer) languages, and in particular I have trouble learning vocabulary. By Lesson 2 I could see already that I was going to have trouble with the vocabulary lists. What I needed was flash cards!

There are probably a bazillion flash card apps around. But it's such a trivial problem, why not re-invent the wheel for the bazillion-and-oneth time? It's more fun to spend an hour hacking Python than to spend an hour googling and tossing out all the Windows and Mac and Java and web oriented solutions looking for something that's small, self-contained and runs on Linux.

So ... my trivial flashcard in Python. It doesn't make you type in the answer -- you just think of the answer and hit return, and if you got it right, hit return again for the next word. If you got it wrong, type something else (. or space or x or whatever) followed by return, and it'll remember that you got it wrong, increase the liklihood of showing you that word again, and print a list of words missed at the end (when you type q to quit).

I needed the

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

at the beginning to keep it from complaining about the various accented characters in some of the Spanish words, but that doesn't automatically make it print those characters correctly. With LANG=C, it translates them into plain ASCII, which is okay with me most of the time. With LANG=en_US.UTF-8, which you'd think would work, it tends to print garbage characters or hexadecimal codes -- not so okay. The trick turns out to be to set it to Spanish:

export LANG=es_ES.UTF-8

Perhaps I can force that in the script. But not right now ... I'm off to She's Geeky, a conference on Women in Tech going on in Mountain View today and tomorrow.

Tags: education
[ 12:45 Oct 22, 2007    More education | permalink to this entry | ]