Inglua

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.

Inglua has a distinct philosophy, which is quite different from most teaching methods. The short story is that we don’t believe much in theory.

After all, didn’t you learn your own language without any grammar books? We believe you can learn a language just by practicing. We won’t even tell you in advance which words you’re about to learn! Whenever you make a mistake, we’ll correct you, and we’ll remember to pester you about that mistake later. And we may give you some directions, when we notice that you’re mixing up por and para for example. But the core of Inglua’s philosophy is: Practice, Practice, Practice!

We try to make it easy to practice, but we also try to make it fun! We’ll show you the progress that you’ve made today, visually! We’ll tell you how much time you’ve left until you’ve mastered your goals. We’ll show how you’re doing compared to your peers. And when you’re tired, and we notice you’re making more and more mistakes, we’ll adjust the difficulty level accordingly.

Learning a language is like cycling up a steep hill. We can’t push you to the top, but we can adjust your gears, show you your average speed, and provide signs along the road.

And we’ll even cheer you on!