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kemushi69 kemushi69 2016-majo-21 2016-majo-21 22:16:31 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

I have a few suggestions for how the "random sentence" feature might be improved. I initially posted this on github, but was advised to repost here instead.

## 1 Include an option somewhere to limit the number of languages shown. ##

There can be a lot of scrolling involved to skip past the translations and languages that you're not interested in. If we had a way of suppressing those languages in the results, that would eliminate much of it.

This could be done with an option like "only display profile languages in results". That might also encourage users to fill in their profile languages.

Other, more fine-grained systems could work, too, though. For example, you could let users divide languages into three "piles"---core languages (ie, profile languages), languages that you have an interest in, and languages that you're not interested in. The first group would always appear, the second would only appear if the user wants them to (via a global option or local options relevant to where they are), while the last group would never be displayed (user would have to move them from the "uninteresting" category into the "core/profile" or "interesting" category), except, perhaps as a summary ("+results in 25 other languages")

## 2 Make translations invisible by default ##

This would be especially useful for the random sentence feature since it would let users test their reading comprehension without being tempted to take a peek at the translation.

This would be an option that could be turned on or off. It could be called "hide translations initially" (or something along the lines of "make translations invisible ..." as above) or it could be given a name like "reading practice mode" or "flashcard mode" or something like that.

The way it would would, I think, would be to have a horizontal "flag bar" immediately below the sentence. It would show a flag for each available translation. Then pressing on one of the flags would toggle visibility of that particular translation. There might also need to be an icon (or text button) to toggle visibility of all translations. Newly-visible translations would appear beneath the flag bar in the same way that they do now.

A simpler alternative to the flag bar would be to keep translations where they are and just have a single toggle button beside them to control visibility. That still wastes a lot of space, though, and wouldn't look very good.

## 3 Make random selection feature work within "collections" or "favourites" ##

I'm not sure what the difference between these two is, but it's not that important. The idea I have here is, again, to make the interface more useful for someone wanting to use collections of sentences as a study/revision aid. In other words, for "collections" to work more like independent stacks of flashcards, to continue the analogy from the last point.

The whole area of collections/favourites (or simply lists/sets of sentences) doesn't seem to be too well developed on the site. I don't see any way of easily sharing collections/favourites beyond trawling user profiles. A simple feature to show a random selection from a particular collection should be a very easy thing to implement and it would, in my opinion, improve the utility of the site no end.

### Closing Remarks

I haven't looked at the code, but it seems that points 1 and 2 could be done on the client side, so it should be pretty easy. Point 3 probably needs a lot of server-side work, though.

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CK CK 2016-majo-21, modifita 2019-oktobro-30 2016-majo-21 23:45:46 UTC, modifita 2019-oktobro-30 10:50:26 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

[not needed anymore- removed by CK]

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kemushi69 kemushi69 2016-majo-22 2016-majo-22 00:40:46 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

re:##1

That's useful to know, CK. Thanks. I didn't see any obvious way of doing that.

I still think it might be useful to allow display of all one's profile languages. Can the search engine do that, I wonder?

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bill bill 2016-majo-22, modifita 2016-majo-22 2016-majo-22 00:47:26 UTC, modifita 2016-majo-22 00:51:05 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

You can do that on the settings page:

http://imgur.com/ln5FT0X

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kemushi69 kemushi69 2016-majo-22 2016-majo-22 01:08:29 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

Excellent. Thank you, bill. I'd already looked at the search options and never noticed that that section could do what I wanted.

CK CK 2016-majo-22, modifita 2019-oktobro-30 2016-majo-22 00:15:14 UTC, modifita 2019-oktobro-30 10:50:17 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

[not needed anymore- removed by CK]

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kemushi69 kemushi69 2016-majo-22 2016-majo-22 01:05:54 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

Re: ##2

I've responded to the newly-created issue in github. Further conversation moves to:

https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1157

Re: ##3

If I'm reading this correctly, the code to do a search would be able to do a join on a table containing a list of sentences (in SQL speak). I'm not sure if collections or favourites are handled any differently from lists, but in theory if one can be implemented, then so can the others. I worry if these database joins might not be too slow or heavy on resources, though?

One other question on this: is the "random" interface separate from the "search" interface, or are they the same thing with "sort=random" giving more specialised output?

TRANG TRANG 2016-majo-22 2016-majo-22 17:17:30 UTC link Konstanta ligilo

Regarding #2, I don't think it would be a good approach to tweak the UI on a gloabal level to add a "hide translations" feature. Practice-mode features should be a completely separate section of the site, or could be also a completely separate app.

What you're asking for is somewhat achievable with lists and Anki. If you browse lists, you can see that some lists are downloadable, like this one: https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences_lists/show/9.
You could therefore create your own lists, or download someone else's list, and use Anki or other similar apps to exercise with these sentences.


Regarding #3, the theoretical difference between collections and favorites is that favorites are sentences that you personally like, because they're interesting or funny to you. Collections are sentences that you've reviewed.

I wouldn't consider it a priority to extend the random feature to favorites and collections. We could make favorites and collections downloadable though, just like we've made some lists downloadable, so that users can import them into flashcard apps like Anki.


Generally speaking, I don't think Tatoeba should focus on providing better features for language learners to practice. Maybe someday, but right now I believe we should focus on improving the quality of our data, provide better features to organize/categorize it, and make it easier to extract subsets of our data to be used in external apps. We should rely on other apps to provide features for language learners to practice a language based on our data.