When I started learning Russian, the declensions (like the ones mentioned in the article) really threw me for a loop. I looked all over for a similar app to explain the patterns and drill rote practice, but never found one.
While slightly off-topic, does anyone know of such an app (web-based or macOS/iOS)?
Ah, as a cheap bastard, I hate how software was pay once back then, and for this one I'm just going to ask you what's the monthly subscription price?
On the other hand, we have software which has low maintenance cost, but sold for peanuts ($0-$10) in small quantities, so authors try to introduce alternative revenue streams.
As in, it's fair to pay continuously (subscription) for continuous work (maintenance), so I don't expect that to go away. Ads, though, yuck...
Increasingly I am not buying software at all.
That said, I very much like Codeweavers’ approach [0], which IMO is the modern equivalent to purchasing software on a physical medium: you buy it, you can re-download it as many times as you’d like, install it on as many machines as you’d like (single-user usage only), and you get 1 year of updates and support. After that, you can still keep using it indefinitely, but you don’t get updates or paid support. You get a discount if you renew before expiry. They also have a lifetime option which, so far, they’ve not indicated they’re going to change.
I have no affiliation with them, I just think it’s a good product, and a good licensing / sales model.
There was a section at the front of the dictionary with full conjugation patterns over all tenses for one sample verb in each class.
Eg, each type of stem-changing verb fell into one index, full irregulars were singletons in their own class, some irregulars that behave similarly (iirc tener and detener) shared one class.
So all verbs in Spanish fell neatly into a few dozen unique patterns, and the indexing was already done.
I was going to build a quiz software just like you mentioned to conjugate any verb in any tense, but “never got around to it”.
I wonder how the reverse-string trie pattern in the article would be for reconstructing the class mapping.
Non-native Russian speaker here. In the past, I cobbled together some scripts that use the spaCy Python module with the larger of the two Russian modules to provide context-aware lemmatization and grammatical tag extraction.
On the whole, though, my biggest gains in Russian were in letting go of the need to analytically deconstruct the inflections and instead build up a mental library of patterns (and exceptions) in my head through use.
EDIT: I mean context within a sentence, not a broader meaning.
> KOFI (Konjugation First) is the name I've given to a provocative language-learning approach I've created: to learn all the forms of a language's conjugation before even starting to formally study the language
I used the French one, years after I learned French, because my conjugation was abysmal. You can get by using basic tenses or wrong tenses, and people will understand you, but it's not what you want. The KOFI method teaches you to learn all the conjugation patterns in a matter of months before learning the language, I'd like to give it a try in-earnest some day for a new language. My interest in French has waned so I didn't stick with it.
Encoding them into a trie like this would still be a good way to distribute the result, but you don't have to rely on the trie also being a good way to guess the declensions.
I also live in a country with a centrally governed personal name list, but you can request exceptions, and there are people who were born before the list existed, so their names won't necessarily be on the list either. Immigrants can also retain their names during naturalization I believe, and there can be lots of other complications still. So the ability to sorta-kinda predict the proper declension is still useful.
It's not a privacy issue if it's just "someone's" name.
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> But that quickly breaks down. There are other names ending with “ður” or “dur” that follow a different pattern of declension
My “everything should be completely orderly” comp-sci brain is always triggered by these almost trivial problems that end up being much more interesting.
Is the suffix pattern based on the pronunciation of the syllable(s) before the suffix? If one wanted to improve upon your work for unknown names, rather than consider the letters used, would you have to do some NLP on the name to get a representation of the pronunciation and look that up (in a trie or otherwise)?
Careful, this is how you fall down the Are Dependent Types The Answer?? hole.
Why not just reuse the existing standard and change everyone’s last names to Kim, Lee, or Park?
*surnames. Not last in that case, whatever the case is you're trying to make.
jedimastert•2h ago