README.md

Emmio is an experimental project focused on language learning. It provides learning and testing algorithms:

1. a learning system based on spaced repetition,
2. a lexicon (vocabulary) level assessment tool.

The project manages four kinds of artifacts:

• dictionaries,
• sentence translations,
• frequency and word lists,
• audio for words and sentences.

Installation

Requires Python 3.12 or later.

pip install git+https://github.com/enzet/emmio

Get Started

To run Emmio, simply execute

emmio

You can specify a data directory with the --data option and a username with the --user option. If not specified, the data directory defaults to ~/.emmio and the username defaults to your current system username.

Lexicon

> lexicon

The algorithm randomly presents words from the target language (weighted by frequency). For each word, you need to indicate

1. whether you know at least one meaning of this word (press y or Enter),
2. wheter you don’t know any meaning of this word (press n),
3. or the word is often used as a proper name or doesn’t exist at all (press -).

Press q to finish.

After completion, the algorithm provides a non-negative number called rate, that indicates your vocabulary level. A score of 0 means you don't know any words in the language, while infinity means you know every word in the frequency list. This rate is most useful for tracking your learning progress and comparing vocabulary levels between different users using the same frequency list.

There is no upper limit for the rate, if you know meanings of all words in a language, the rate is infinity. It’s finite though, if you don’t know meaning of at least one word.

Rate	Level
near 3	Beginner, elementary
near 5	Intermediate, upper intermediate
near 7	Advanced, proficient
more than 9	Native

Lexicon configuration:

"lexicon": {
    "<language>": "<frequency list id>",
    ...
}

• language is 2-letters ISO 639-1 language code (e.g. en for English and ru for Russian).
• frequency list id is an identifier of full frequency file. Important: for Lexicon you can use only full (not stripped) frequency list.

Wiktionary

Wiktionary project contains frequency lists for different languages.

Data directory structure

Emmio data directory is located by default in ~/.emmio and contains all downloaded artifacts and their configuration files and collected user data.

• dictionaries — single word translations.
• sentences — whole sentence translations.
• lists — frequency lists and simple word lists.
• users — user data.
  • <user name>
    • config.json — user configuration file.
    • learn — user learning process data.
    • lexicon — user lexicon checking data.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries are entities that provide definitions and translations for single words. Artifacts are controlled by configuration file dictionaries/config.json.

Emmio supports:

• dictionaries stored in JSON files,
• English Wiktionary (through WiktionaryParser).

Frequency lists and word lists

Frequency list is a relation between unique words and the number of their occurrences in some text of a corpus of texts. Some frequency lists are stripped (e.g. 6,500-lemma list based on the New Corpus for Ireland).

FrequencyWords (Opensubtitles)

There is Hermit Dave’s project FrequencyWords, which contains full and stripped frequency lists extracted from subtitles in Opensubtitles project.