gredig

A communal language-learning exercise. One of the trickiest things when learning a language is to get feedback on your mistakes. This system provides a hopefully effective method for that.

How it works

You enter a sentence in a language you're trying to learn. This can be anything at all, suited to your proficiency with the language. You could make something up off the top of your head, or translate something. Don't be shy -- it's entirely pseudonymous (the server doesn't even log IP addresses). If you're really stuck for ideas, try translating this sentence!

Some other kind soul who is fluent in that language contributes a revised version of the sentence, written as a native speaker would write it.

You compare the two to see where you're going wrong.

If the revision is no good, you can reject it. This puts the sentence back on the list for someone to revise it.

Usage and privacy

Identification is via client certificate. You will probably want to create a fresh certificate to use on this system. Best is to have your client provide the certificate for every request to the server, since some pages will be personalised if a certificate is provided.

Users are given automatic pseudonyms based on their client certificate hash.

IP addresses are not logged. Only a salted hash of the client certificate is used and stored (in particular, the Common Name is ignored and may be left blank).

If you want to play around with the system without interfering with proper use of it, please use the fake language code "sandbox"

The language view pages are in gmisub format. You can subscribe to the languages you're fluent in to see when there are new sentences you might be able to help with.

Conventions

If you want to add editorial notes to your revised version of a sentence, put them in square brackets [like this]. You can write such notes in the same language as the sentence itself.

If the sentence you're revising seems truly unimprovable: probably it isn't, look again. But if it still is, you can just say as much (e.g. "[Perfect!]") rather than copy and paste.

If you see a spam sentence, please remove it by revising it to "[Deleted]" or similar.

Feedback

Feedback welcomed! Is it easily navigable in your favourite client? Did you run into any bugs? Do you have ideas for improvements? Let me know at <mbays@sdf.org>.

Source

Source tarball for current version.

git bundle (clone with 'git clone gredig.bundle gredig')