Project goal

The English Assist project aims to help you learn a new language. More precisely, to simplify learning new words and extending your vocabulary.
The project itself is pretty similar to online flashcards, kind of Anki. But the main difference is that instead of hitting the button that you answered or not, you have an alternative option to typing the words you've just learned. Users don't have to use mice all the time. The interface is built in a way you can do everything using the keyboard.

You can find a website here: https://obaranovskyi.github.io/english-assist
And here is the repo: https://github.com/obaranovskyi/english-assist

Usage

Adding the words

On the top, we have a menu. Once you open the website, you are navigated to the words page, and the words menu item is highlighted. As you might guess, to start learning new words, you must create flashcards.
There are two options to add the flashcards:

1. You can enter them manually.
2. You can provide a list of words in a JSON format.
3. There is an application that can generate a JSON for you.

Option 1: Add word

Click on the "Add word". Once you do that, the "Add word" form will be expanded. In this form, you must enter the word you want to learn in the language you're learning and the word translation. After you finish with this, click on the "Update" button. As soon as you do it, the word will appear on the word list.

Option 2: Upload words list

It's more likely that you would want to provide the list of words in one go. It's possible, but you only have to provide the list in the following format:

[
  { "originalValue": "The word you want to learn", "translation": "Translation of the word you want to learn"},
  { "originalValue": "...", "translation": "..."},
  { "originalValue": "...", "translation": "..."}
]

Option 3: Install cmdenglishassist

Another options is to install cmdcheatsheet.

It can be found here: https://github.com/obaranovskyi/cmdenglishassist

It's a terminal program that accepts a link to Google Translate, where you've entered the words you want to learn. It does much more, but I will allocate a separate article with the manual on how to use this tool. In the scope of this article, you have to know that cmdenglishassist can help to generate the list of words in the needed format.

Create a snapshot

After you've added the words, you'll likely want to repeat them. So, you would better create a snapshot so that you can repeat what you've learned later. To do so, click on the cache menu. Once you are navigated to the cache page, you'll see Store in cache. This helps to create a snapshot. Click on it, enter the snapshot's name, and hit the Cache button to store the snapshot.

Whenever you return to repeat, open the cache page and the snapshot you're looking for by name. Once you find it, hit the Apply button, and that's it. Now, you're ready to repeat the words.

Note: In case you want the last snapshot to be applied by default, you need to check if you have checked the "Apply the first word list on the initial load" checkbox on the Settings page.

Studying the words

Now that you have the words to learn, you can start learning them. Studying the words can be done on the page "Test."

Before I dive deeper into the explanation, I must explain how flashcards work in case you didn't have a chance to get familiar with them before.

First, you must choose the number of words you want to learn. That is "The number of words per test". By default, it's set to 5. Then, you'll see the first word from the list. If you know it, you hit "I know the word" otherwise, "I don't know the word". Instead of hitting the "I know the word" button, you can type the answer and hit the Enter button on your keyboard. If you click that you know the word, the word disappears and goes to the end of the list. When you click "I don't know the word," it disappears and goes to the middle of the list. Overall, you have to click on the same word "I know the word" button five times to stop seeing it. The same goes for the rest of the words to accomplish the test. If you want to increase or decrease the number of correct answers for a single word, you can change it in the dropdown with the name "Number of correct answers per word." Last but not least, we have a dropdown called "Test number." When you upload words you want to learn, and you uploaded more than ten words, for example, twenty or even more and you want to study the following ten words, I mean word eleven, twelve, and so on you have to change "Test number" dropdown value from one to two. In other words, we can say that it's paging. And if you want to study words from page two, you must select test two.

Summary

Generally speaking, using this program, you not only interactively learn new words but also learn to avoid incorrect word spelling. Of course, it's free to use, and you don't have to sign up or log in. However, it is important to note that I haven't used the database, as the goal was to build a system where users can "type the words" to learn; everything else was beyond the scope. So you have a limited amount of space. Thus, once you learn new words, dropping the set of words from the cache is the best option.