A Telegram bot that helps you learn German der/die/das articles
- Clone the repo
- Edit settings/set the env variables (see
settings.tomland.env.example) - Create and activate a virtual environment:
python3 -m venv .venv && source ./.venv/bin/activate - Install dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt - Run
make run
As an alternative,
- Run
docker compose upafter the first two steps
You'll need a db collection 'dictionary' with documents like this:
{"word":"Bahnhof","articles":"der","translation":{"en":"(railway) station"},"level":85}
Todo
- Daily quiz ✔
- Spaced repetition ✔
- Statistics ✔
- Hint: translation and/or context ✔
- Webhooks instead of long polling ✔
- Add Docker build/push actions to CI ✔
- Randomize quiz time on 1st start ✔
- Move DB to MongoDB Atlas ✔
- Revise the dictionary
- Add some tools for dictionary management
- Select words by level -- A1, B1, ...
- i18n
- Let users add their words
- "Forget me" command
- Custom quiz intervals ("N times/day every 3 hours")
- Postpone broadcast when restarting after outage (use a one-off script?)
Spaced repetition
I've adapted a simple algorithm borrowed from drill-srs.
| Card score | Wait time |
|---|---|
| 0 | (new question) |
| 1 | 1 hour |
| 2 | 1 day |
| 3 | 1 week |
| 4 | 1 month |
| 5 | 3 months |
| 6 | 6 months |
A correct answer increases the card's score by 1, while a mistake decreases its score by 1.
Сorner cases
- Some nouns can have different gender depending on the meaning: der See (lake) - die See (sea), der Leiter (leader) - die Leiter (ladder)
- For some nouns, more than one gender is correct, with the same meaning (der/das Teil)
- Sometimes gender depends on the context (die/der Jugendliche, Beschäftigte, Erwachsene, Geliebte)
- ... what else?