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for you to learn based on the content you actually consume and the goals you set for yourself, not on some generic, outdated list formulated decades ago by some aging grammar teacher.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 2019-02-05
| 9 minutes
| 1723 words
| Anton Melser
This is Part 1 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.
Introduction Microk8s is a kube-in-a-box distribution sponsored by Ubuntu, and in this blog post I recount my experiences getting my own personal Transcrobes installation migrated to a Kubernetes Helm chart and running on it on a 4GB VM on Alibaba Cloud in China.
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Posted on 2018-11-26
| 1 minutes
| 140 words
| Anton Melser
This blog post announces the official open-sourcing of the (brand new) Transcrobes project. Code is available for all components on Gitlab.
Some ideas were originally posted to Blogger before the code was open-sourced. Future blogposts on the project by the maintainers should happen directly on https://transcrob.es.
Transcrobes proposes a new paradigm for language learning, one that finally puts each individual language learner at the centre of everything. Content-based instruction, extensive reading and other modern approaches have been pushing in this direction for several decades, Transcrobes is an open source project that takes this approach to the logical conclusion.
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