Peter Ex Texia

Recently, I had become aware that Anki 2.0 was in beta through my friend Tom, who is working on making some changes to the MCD Support plugin so that it supports languages like Spanish as well as it does Japanese. Despite this awareness, it never crossed my mind that I might need to update the Esperanto Support addon that I wrote a couple years ago until I received an email from Damien Elmes, the author of Anki, that it was time to look at doing so.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

If you’ve been keeping up with the language learning scene online, you have probably heard of Learning With Texts (LWT), which is software to assist you in studying foreign language text. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, then I recommend checking out Benny’s excellent introduction to Learning With Texts , because the rest of this post won’t mean much to you if you are unfamiliar with it.  This article also assumes you are aware of Anki , so if you’re not then you should read this introduction to Anki and Spaced Repetition and forget about forgetting ever again.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

About two weeks ago, in an effort to increase my Esperanto vocabulary, I signed up for lernu.net’s Vorto de la Tago (Word of the Day) service, which sends a daily email with, you guessed it, the word of the day. These emails are great for SRS because they include quite a few example sentences. The definitions are also monolingual (Esperanto-only, no English translations), which I think is a good thing because I notice that when I read Esperanto text I translate it to English mentally, thus slowing me down. So now I have these great daily reminders to add some new sentences to my SRS, and they’re forcing me to use the language to describe itself rather than using the crutch called English. And what did I do with these fantastic reminders?

This post is a result of many attempts at trying to find an existing solution, deciding that nothing did what I needed, and writing the code myself. Specifically, I wanted to be able to verify whether or not that a file is a valid MP3 file from Python. I did not want any dependency on non-Python code (for cross-platform reasons), nor did I need to encode, decode, play, record, or any other such operations to the file. I just needed to know if it was an MP3 or not, and that is all. Oh yeah, and the file will probably have a random file name without the .mp3 extension.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Consider this an admission of guilt. I am learning Esperanto . Esperanto has both its critics and proponents in the language learning community, which initially bothered me. Nobody has criticized me for wanting to learn Spanish, nor has anyone (including myself) felt the need to defend that desire. I expect that the same would be true if I suddenly decided to learn German, Hindi, Arabic, or Navajo. Yet, for some reason, Esperanto draws in critics and defenders. This has kept me from posting about it here, but now I’ve decided that my decisions don’t need to be defended, and criticisms are easily ignored.

So I decided to learn Esperanto, which as an avid user of the SRS application Anki, meant I needed to either enter Esperanto’s special characters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ­) into my flash cards, which can’t easily be typed with the US International keyboard layout, or I could deal with the ugly “x method” workaround (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux). At first, I was only creating Esperanto cards from my Linux computers at home, which let me use an Esperanto keyboard layout to type in the special characters. Pretty soon though, I found myself creating cards from my Windows machine at work during breaks. There is no Esperanto keyboard layout in Windows by default, so I tried to install some third party keyboard layouts without success. I eventually came across a program called Ek, which seemed to do the job of letting me type special characters, except in Anki where it would only type “ĉ”. So I just dealt with the “x method” and was typing words like vojagxas instead of vojaĝas. I don’t know why, but after a while all the x’s began to really bother me. I didn’t want to see mangxi in my flash cards, it just doesn’t seem as natural as manĝi does. So I did what any other software developer would do….

So aside from my day job and my family, I’ve been keeping myself busy since December working on a project with my friend Thomas that we’ve released to the public just a few weeks ago. That project is RhinoSpike, a web site where people can submit text in a foreign language to be read aloud and recorded by native speakers of that language. In return, people can read and record themselves reading texts submitted in their native language for students of that language. It’s swap meet of mp3 files, only instead of copyrighted music, these mp3 files contain the voice and sound of many languages worldwide! I consider it my small and humble contribution to the goal of bringing peace and goodwill towards men through learning each others language.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Within the last few months, I decided that I am finally going to get some international travel under my belt. I’m going to save my money, and I’m going to Japan. The actual trip probably won’t happen until next year, but it’s going to happen, and I’ve already made good progress in saving up for the trip. Why Japan? Mostly because Thomas, my friend and fellow Babelhut.com writer, lives there with his wife and child. What better way to travel internationally than to get someone you know to show you around?

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Welcome to the first post of a new series at Babelhut.com, Spanish Verb Highlight. This series will highlight a different Spanish verb in every post, and provide several example sentences showing how the verb is used in different tenses.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Today I received yet another envelope from Time Warner Cable addressed to “Peter Carroll or Current Resident,” which was seconds from being thrown in the trash can when I decided to open it. This is what was inside: