We could simply give you a site where you could practice words, but our ambitions are bigger! We’d also like to teach to form short phrases, to use the correct verb forms, to employ the right word order, and to use words in context.
But while building a program that can test how well you can form phrases, we have accidentally created an absurd poetry generator.
With great ease it produces sentences such as “The happy zero trickles.”, “They warn the awkward sharks.”, “A surprised temper decorates them.”, “A plump path teases the outings.”, “The nasty cross dies.” and many more. In all supported languages, of course.
How to improve these results? For each noun, should we store whether it can be happy, plump, reluctant? For “to decorate” whether a temper, a shark, a cross can decorate, or be decorated?
That’s not feasible. Instead, we partition the nouns in abstract (love) and concrete ones (tigers), the concrete nouns in animate (lions) and inanimate (bricks), animate nouns in animals (cats) and people (firemen), and so one.
Now we can create rules to express that only concrete nouns can be green, only animate nouns can be happy, and, of course, only people can tease.
This will only get us so far, of course, and we’ll probably produce plenty of nonsense. But we hope that our users will consider this one of Inglua’s charms, not warts. May it keep you amused during your long hours of study.
