Transcrobes provides deeply individualised comprehension and learning aids, to turn any authentic text into an optimised tool for language learning. Get help only with the stuff you need help for, with automatic glosses for unknown words, and on-demand definitions, translations, similar sentences, synonyms, and direct integration with active learning tools like spaced repetition, and much more.
Personalise every aspect of the texts and aids, including the text and gloss fonts, text and gloss colours, gloss content, light/dark mode and more, so you choose the way in which you are most comfortable reading and learning.
With video, ebooks, web and and text you can copy/paste or put in a text file supported, you are not limited to a restricted catalogue of material, and can explore the language and culture on your own terms.
An ecosystem of learning
Because humans are complex and learn using many different techniques in many different contexts, Transcrobes provides many different ways to learn, and is constantly evolving to add new ways to learn. The project has a non-dogmatic “if it works, it’s good” attitude, and plans to make tools that can be effectively used by individual learners, tutors, schools, universities, companies and governments alike.
The current phase targets independent learning and has two focuses: authentic content-based learning and spaced repetition, and other tools and techniques will be added as the project moves forward.
Repetrobes, the integrated spaced-repetition/flashcard software for learning vocabulary has a number of advanced modes, including calculating the most valuable vocabulary for you to learn based on the content you actually consume and the goals you set for yourself, not on some generic, outdated list formulated decades ago by some aging grammar teacher.
Reflect and analyse
Control and understand your progress over time, with self-defined goals, statistics and more to give you both the learning tools and insights into your own learning, to achieve what you want, and not what someone else wants for you (though the two are obviously not mutually exclusive!).
Research
Transcrobes is also an active research project, focused on understanding how learners really learn in real learning environments over real learning timescales (so years), rather than the artificial experimental contexts (so hours) most current research has decided to use, for the sake of simplicity. Transcrobes hopes to show that academic research can actually produce real value for real people while producing high-quality research, rather than only produce abstract results that are very difficult to apply in real-life contexts.
Posted on 2019-02-27
| 2 minutes
| 229 words
| Anton Melser
UPDATE: 2020-12-01 English support has been temporarily removed in order to focus fully on Chinese. If there is significant community interest, that could always change.
Preliminary support for Chinese learners of English has been implemented and is now available for testing. As expected, integrating a second language pair required basically rewriting the entire system to be able to handle any input and output language.
That said, the inflectional characteristics of English are a new challenge for the system and have not been fully integrated.
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Posted on 2019-02-17
| 9 minutes
| 1790 words
| Anton Melser
This is Part 3 of a mini-series of my experiences getting Transcrobes migrated from separate server apps on a 4gig Alibaba Cloud VM to microk8s on the same VM, and automating (almost) everything with Gitlab CI.
Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Kubernetes Migration Woes nginx-ingress I was coming from a setup where I knew the component parts (Apache + mod_wsgi) pretty well. I haven’t been working on high-load web stuff for over 8 years now, and always thought that nginx was a lot of hype for not much benefit.
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