Russian

(N.B. A much-improved version of this script is published in a later post)

Language learners who want to develop their listening comprehension skills often turn to YouTube for videos that feature native language content. Often these videos have subtitles in the original language. A handful of applications allow users to take these videos along with their subtitles and chop them up into sentence-length bites that are suitable for Anki cards. Once such application is Knowclip. Indeed for macOS users, it’s one of the few viable options.¹

After developing a rudimentary approach to detecting resistant language learning cards in Anki, I began teasing out individual factors. Once I was able to adjust the number of lapses for the age of the card, I could examine the effect of different factors on the difficulty score that I described previously.

Findings

Some of the interesting findings from this analysis:

• Prompt-answer direction - 62% of lapses were in the Russian → English (recognition) direction.¹
• Part of speech - Over half (51%) of lapses were among verbs. Since the Russian verbal system is rich and complex, it’s not surprising to find that verb cards often fail.
• Noun gender - Between a fifth and a quarter (22%) of all lapses were among neuter nouns and among failures due to nouns only, neuter nouns represented 69% of all lapses. This, too, makes intuitive sense because neuter nouns often represent abstract concepts that are difficult to represent mentally. For example, the Russian words for community, representation, and indignation are all neuter nouns.

Interventions

With a better understanding of the factors that contribute to lapses, it is easier to anticipate failures before they accumulate. For example, I will immediately implement a plan to surround new neuter nouns with a larger variety of audio and sample sentence cards. For new verbs, I’ll do the same, ensuring that I include multiple forms of the verb, varying the examples by tense, number, person, aspect and so on.

As readers of this blog know, I’m an avid user of Anki to learn Russian. I have a number of sources for reference content that go onto my Anki cards. Notably, I use Wiktionary to get word definitions and the word with the proper syllabic stress marked. (This is an aid to pronunciation for Russian language learners.)

Since I’m lazy to the core, I came up with a system way of grabbing the stress-marked word from the Wiktionary page using lxml and XPath.

Previously, I wrote about adding syllabic stress marks to Russian text. Here’s a method for doing the opposite - that is, removing such marks (ударение) from Russian text.

Although there may well be a more sophisticated approach, regex is well-suited to this task. The problem is that

def string_replace(dict,text):
   sorted_dict = {k: dict[k] for k in sorted(dict)}
   for n in sorted_dict.keys():
      text = text.replace(n,dict[n])
   return text

dict = { "а́" : "а", "е́" : "е", "о́" : "о", "у́" : "у",
      "я́" : "я", "ю́" : "ю", "ы́" : "ы", "и́" : "и",
      "ё́" : "ё", "А́" : "А", "Е́" : "Е", "О́" : "О",
      "У́" : "У", "Я́" : "Я", "Ю́" : "Ю", "Ы́" : "Ы",
      "И́" : "И", "Э́" : "Э", "э́" : "э"
   } 
   
print(string_replace(dict, "Существи́тельные в шве́дском обычно де́лятся на пять склоне́ний."))

This should print: Существительные в шведском обычно делятся на пять склонений.

The AppleScript Safari API is apparently quite finicky and rejects Russian Cyrillic characters when loading URLs.

For example, the following URL https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/стоять#Russian throws an error in AppleScript. Instead, Safari requires URL’s of the form https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian whereas Chrome happily consumes whatever comes along. So, we just need to encode the URL thusly:

use framework "Foundation"

-- encode Cyrillic test as "%D0" type strings
on urlEncode(input)
   tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input)
   -- 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding
   set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 
   return theEncodedURL as Unicode text
end urlEncode

When researching Russian words for vocabulary study, I use the URL encoding handler to load the appropriate words into several reference sites in sequential Safari tabs.

I was puzzled by this sentence on the BBC Russian Service:

Нет свидетельств тому, что на нынешних выборах дело обстоит иначе.

It means “There is no evidence that in the current election things are any different.” but the puzzle isn’t the meaning, it’s the grammatical case in which the author has placed the demonstrative pronoun то , which is dative here тому . The thing is that you see examples where either the genitive or the dative follows свидетельство . So what’s the difference?

There’s a phenomenon that verteran Anki users are familiar with - the so-called “Anki hell” or “ease hell.”

Origins of ease hell

The descent into ease hell has to do with the way Anki handles correct and incorrect answers when it presents cards for review. Ease is a numerical score associated with every card in the database and represents a valuation of the difficulty of the card. By default, when cards graduate from the learning phase, an ease of 250% is applied to the card. If you continue to get the card correct, then the ease remains at 250% in perpetuity. As you see the card at its increasing intervals, the ease will remain the same. All good. Sort of.

While Russian text intended for native speakers doesn’t show accented vowel characters to point out the syllabic stress (ударение) , many texts intended for learners often do have these marks. But how to apply these marks when typing?

Typically, for Latin keyboards on macOS, you can hold down the key (like long-press on iOS) and a popup dialog will show you options for that character. But in the standard Russian phonetic keyboard it doesn’t work. Hold down the e key and you’ll get the option for the letter ë (yes, it’s regarded as a separate letter in Russian - the essential but misbegotten ë .)