ArtiKulate in Edu playground

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

Hey all,

I would like to give a short heads up for a new language learning (or more 
specifically: a pronunciation learning) application, that arrived in the
KDE Edu playground last night. It's called "ArtiKulate" and aims to help for 
the following language learning problem:

When learning a new language, usually the following skills must be 
accomplished: writing, reading, speaking, and understanding. For writing and 
reading a lot of materials and software programs (e.g., Parley for learning 
vocabulary) exist. But the important field of speaking and correct 
pronunciation of words and sentences is barely considered, yet, though it is 
one of the most important skills in real life.

ArtiKulate shall help to tackle this problem down and provide a useful 
application to improve pronunciation skills. It works/will work as follows:
* the user can select a language, a course, and either a topic (like sentences 
needed e.g. in a restaurant) or a problematic sound (like e.g. the "th" sound 
in English).
* the user then gets a set of sentences in increasing difficulty (here 
difficulty means the length of the sentences)
* the user then plays a recording of a native speaker who speaks this sentence 
(the recording is shipped with the course) [see below for the problem on how 
to get those recording]
* after this, the user records its own voice when speaking the sentence and 
can compare both recordings
* if the user is not happy with her/his recording, she/he repeats the previous 
step

The concept is quite simple and the application is not very hard to write 
(well, the devil lives in the details as I learned again the last nights when 
implementing the recording functionality...). What now arrived in playground 
is a very basic UI (I plan to make it nice, once the functionality is in 
place), the functionality for the user to select courses, play sentences, 
record sounds (Selection of problematic syllables is current work in 
progress). And the next important step will be the creation of an editor for 
the units as well as a merging tool for courses/recordings of different users.

The plan for the time after both, the basic functionality is done and the UI 
reached a state that I would not be ashamed to show a user, still the most 
important task remains: Preparing and collection courses and recordings of 
native speakers. I have early plans on how to accomplish that, but will again 
write about that once the application itself is in a good shape.

Finally, I would like to invite everybody who is interested in this 
application to follow its development (now in the public at 
https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/edu/artikulate) or even join its 
development.


Greetings,
Andreas


Link to the source code: 
https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/edu/artikulate
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