Flashcard Tutor

Flashcard Tutor is a project that combines Microsoft Flow, Github and Twitter for teaching languages in a form of modern flashcards.

Origin

When I started learning japanese it turned out that there are many alphabets: hiragana, katakana, kanji. And I needed a way to learn and remember all of those new characters. The best option seems to be to constantly remind myself of what I learned.

Around the same time I was playing with Microsoft Flow, the tool that easilly allows you to automate some business logic without the need to create and host a separate application. It is serverless and free (up to 750 executions for month). It allows to build an application logic by joining some very basics blocks to create more complex flows.

One of the building blocks is a Twitter account connector. It is very easy to send a tweet. I am a Twitter user and I follow many people. And also a few bots (probably :)) that from time to time sends some usefull information and even japanese words to learn for every day. But I cannot find a bot with just an alphabet for the polish language.

So I decided to create one. As a developer I came up with a configurable solution that could be extended by new languages (flashcards) to learn. So you can use it for other languages and actually anything you find useful to know.

How it works

Github

In this Github repository there is a courses folder with files in JSON format. Each file is meant to have data set for one course that will be tweeted by one account. In addition in the configuration file file there are references to that JSON files. That allows to add / remove courses.

Almost a flashcard

The concept of a flashcard is that on one side of a paper you have the word you want to learn. On the opposite side there is a translation. So you can check yourself to see if you know this word.

In the Flashcard Tutor solution, the tweets are not reversible, so the word you want to learn is in the first line. In the next lines there is a translation (or pronunciation). And you can have as many lines as you want.

Microsoft Flow

In my Microsoft Flow account, one of the flow is running every hour. It checks the Github repository and reads the configuration file. There it finds all courses that should be executed, with URLs to each course data file. Then it takes all the course data from configured data files. For each course it randomly chooses one entry and tweets it.

For now there are only 750 free flow executions each month. As I have few more flows there, I decided to run all courses at the same time. Also the Twitter connector block has hardcoded Twitter accounts. So in order to add a new course I have to manually change the flow.

Twitter

I created a new account for the project: Flashcard Tutor (https://twitter.com/FlashcardTutor). Also, there will be new account for each course so people interested in specific course could subscribe to it.

For now there are 2 accounts:

1. Japanese hiragana characters (https://twitter.com/ft_jpnpol_hirag)
2. Japanese katakana characters (https://twitter.com/ft_jpnpol_katak)

How to add your courses

If you want to use the Flashcard Tutor to learn some language of your choice, you have to prepare new data file and the configuration have to be extended.

You have two options:

1. Contact me at ft@creyn.pl
2. Create PR with the updated configuration file and new JSON data file. The file must be in specific format.