Separate fields for grammar, articles, pronunciation, Katakana, Romanization#241
We regularly receive feature requests to add fields for special properties for specific languages.
For example:
- Articles / Gender field for German
- Verb conjugation field for French, Italian (and other roman languages)
- IPA-Pronunciation field for French, English
- Katakana field for Japanese
- Romanization field for Asian languages
While each of these certainly would be helpful for practicing the specific language, this list also shows how different the requirements for the languages are.
In general, we don’t want to add features for specific languages (or language families).
Wokabulary can be used to learn any language, and we rather focus on features that benefit learners of all (or at least most) languages.
We recommend using the comment field for any additional information like pronunciation or romanization. The Markdown support even allows you to format the comments to your needs.
For some common language challenges, we also have tips on how to best handle them in Wokabulary:
Articles and Gender
Most European languages have a concept of grammatical gender. So, words can be male, female, or neutral.
We recommend storing this information as part of the word itself by adding the article to the word field. For example, for German you can add words like “die Schule”, or for French as “le livre”. This provides for a more natural way to learn the words with gender than adding special annotation. Plus, it works well with the speech output system.
Verb conjugation & Grammar hints
We recommend adding verb conjugation and other grammar information to the comment.
As the comment supports Markdown and uses a fixed width font, you can easily format this information to your needs.
Pronunciation
For the most common languages, Wokabulary provides speech output using macOS’ and iOS’ speech output system, which provides quite good pronunciation.
If you need to add special pronunciation information, we recommend adding that to the comment. You can even enter IPA there.
Katakana for Japanese
We know that Japanese has some special challenges as it uses multiple script systems. But we haven’t yet come up with an idea to provide more options for Japanese without needing to make major changes to the general editing and quiz interface.
We recommend entering Japanese words in the writing system a Japanese person would use and adding alternative representation or romanizations in the comment.
Romanization for Asian languages
We know it is a challenge to learn a different script. So, learners of Asian languages often start by writing down words in romanization. However, like with Japanese, we recommend entering the “real” form of the word in the native script in Wokabulary and add any romanization to the comment. This works best with the speech output system. Also, as you get more advanced in a language, you will start using the native script and don’t want to change all the words you had entered as a beginner.