index.xml

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    <title>Transcrobes</title>
    <link>/</link>
    <description>Recent content on Transcrobes</description>
    <generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>
    <managingEditor>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</webMaster>
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    <item>
      <title>In search of Science</title>
      <link>/post/in-search-of-science/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/in-search-of-science/</guid>
      <description>All models are wrong, but some are useful (after George E. P. Box)
There seem to be two kinds of &amp;ldquo;science&amp;rdquo;. One with a capital - Science - and one without - science. Alas, it appears that academics and commentators throughout the Western world are yet to discover this. We very predominantly hear them talk about &amp;ldquo;science&amp;rdquo; with a lowercase &amp;ldquo;s&amp;rdquo; - at least in most types of popular and political discourse - when really they mean &amp;ldquo;Science&amp;rdquo;.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Content Stats</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/content-stats/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/content-stats/</guid>
      <description>In various places in the application that analyse and enrich content you can find little coloured boxes that appear, like you can see on the Content list page
Or on Brocrobes, that appears when you Transcrobe a webpage
Colours The system colour-codes the expected difficulty level, depending on the percentage of known words and the sentence length. We&amp;rsquo;re working on more advanced and even more personalised options at the moment.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>My Stats</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/stats/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/stats/</guid>
      <description>Understanding the current state of your knowledge and how that has evolved over time is a very effective way for many learners to make the most of their learning time and (mental) effort. Transcrobes will eventually provide a very rich interface for analysing and understanding many aspects of learning, including what the most effective activities are for each individual learner.
While we are just at the beginning, Transcrobes aims to be a quantified self project for language learning - helping you to deeply understand how you - and that means YOU and not some random, Ivory Tower abstraction - learn best.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>What does it mean to know a word, and how do we learn them?</title>
      <link>/post/knowing-a-word/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/knowing-a-word/</guid>
      <description>Probably the main indicator of progress in language learning is increasing &amp;ldquo;known vocabulary&amp;rdquo;. While that sounds pretty uncontroversial* and simple, actually deciding what &amp;ldquo;knowing a word&amp;rdquo; is is actually a subject of hot debate! Particularly when we need to be very precise about things - exactly what you need when you create software - things start to get much less clear.
How do you know whether you know something? The answer to this question is one that has challenged philosophers and sages since time immemorial!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Getting Started</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/getting-started/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/getting-started/</guid>
      <description>Welcome! Transcrobes is an open ecosystem for learning languages, with actual learners at the centre of all research, development and services.
It is open source, open research and open education.
Sign up for free to be a part of Transcrobes today
What can it do? Transcrobes provides deeply individualised comprehension and learning aids, to turn any authentic text into an optimised tool for language learning. Get help only with the stuff you need help for, with automatic glosses for unknown words, and on-demand definitions, translations, similar sentences, synonyms, and direct integration with active learning tools like spaced repetition, and much more.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Beijing University Chinese (Characters) for Beginners</title>
      <link>/page/software/resources/beida/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/resources/beida/</guid>
      <description>Resources for beginners Here are the lists of vocabulary, extracted into Transcrobes-compatible CSV import files for each course and lesson. After importing each file, you can create a list and then learn/revise in Repetrobes.
The &amp;ldquo;Chinese Characters for Beginners&amp;rdquo; courses have a focus on getting you to understand better how Chinese characters are constructed, so you can better understand the logic behind them, and thus more easily learn. They have some vocabulary that you might not need right away but you can also usefully learn in Repetrobes.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>MandarinX Mandarin Chinese Levels 1-3</title>
      <link>/page/software/resources/mandarinx/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/resources/mandarinx/</guid>
      <description>Resources for beginners Here are the lists of vocabulary, extracted into Transcrobes-compatible CSV import files for each course and lesson. After importing each file, you can create a list and then learn/revise in Repetrobes.
While the courses below are not &amp;ldquo;free&amp;rdquo;, in that in order to get a certificate and do all the quizzes you need to pay, you can audit them, watch all the videos and access some of the quizzes and resources.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Resources</title>
      <link>/page/software/resources/home/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/resources/home/</guid>
      <description>In this section of the website you can find resources that will help you connect your learning to other sources. You can obviously bring your own resources to Transcrobes, and for most things like content, you will need to.
You can find detailed getting started information for beginners, or for advanced Beginners+. These pages give (quite long) introductions into many aspects of language learning that you might not think of but are important if you want to learn efficiently, so when you have some spare time, you should take a few moments to read through them.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Shanghai Jiaotong University Chinese for Beginners</title>
      <link>/page/software/resources/jiaoda/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/resources/jiaoda/</guid>
      <description>Resources for beginners Here are the lists of vocabulary, extracted into Transcrobes-compatible CSV import files for each course and lesson. After importing each file, you can create a list and then learn/revise in Repetrobes. On occasion words that appear in the lesson but not in the &amp;ldquo;vocab lists&amp;rdquo; have been added to the lists here.
Some of the resources provided by the course won&amp;rsquo;t be necessary for you with Transcrobes. For example, several of the lessons (particularly in the 3rd course) include SWF files that you can download to see the character strokes animated.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Beginning with Transcrobes</title>
      <link>/post/getting-started-beginner/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/getting-started-beginner/</guid>
      <description>tl;dr Do an (online or offline) introductory course to get started with learning grammar and basic vocabulary. Use the Transcrobes vocabulary learning and revision tools to super-charge your learning, and then use it to start consuming real content as soon as you feel you can. Introduction Transcrobes already has a lot of advanced functionality, but here is some introductory advice on how to start using it for beginners to Chinese. A lot of Transcrobes functionality is currently focussed on developing written skills (reading, writing, vocabularly), so if you are a heritage learner with a large spoken vocabulary but only recognise a few characters, you should also start here (but you&amp;rsquo;ll likely progress VERY fast!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Getting started as an intermediate learner</title>
      <link>/post/getting-started-intermediate/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/getting-started-intermediate/</guid>
      <description>tl;dr Bootstrap If you already use an application, then export the vocab you already know and import that as a list to Transcrobes. Importing let&amp;rsquo;s you bootstrap your account so the system learns what you know. If your current/previous application doesn&amp;rsquo;t allow that, or you are just getting started learning with software, then head to the Listrobes input tool and spend as much time as you can be bothered telling the system what words you already know.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Learning using Transcrobes</title>
      <link>/post/learning/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/learning/</guid>
      <description>As a teenager (and later), you aren&amp;rsquo;t the &amp;ldquo;blank slate&amp;rdquo; that you are when you learn your first language. You have a certain number of skills and learning habits that need to be taken advantage of if you want to learn a language most efficiently. Transcrobes has already implemented a number of functionalities that help you better manage the activities that are most valuable and useful for learning. Development of features is driven by science - unfortunately something that is often lacking in both mandatory schooling and software designed for language learning.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Live Server Experiment</title>
      <link>/post/experiment/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/experiment/</guid>
      <description>After many months of intense focus on developing new features and making the system faster and more scalable, the system is now ready for real learners, adding real value for language learners who wish to super-charge their learning in a fun and efficient way.
Experimental platform The Meaningful IO research project experimental server is now live, and accepting signups for learners of Mandarin Chinese who are willing to participate in the research project.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>About Transcrobes</title>
      <link>/page/about/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/about/</guid>
      <description>For language learners What is it? Transcrobes is a set of applications that evolve with you as you learn a language and enable you to watch, listen and read the content that you want to, rather than the insanely boring and limited &amp;ldquo;normal&amp;rdquo; language learning content. If you can access the content in digital form, basically you can use it with Transcrobes*.
How does it work? The system knows what you know, so can give you just the right amount of help to be able to understand the words you don&amp;rsquo;t know but gets out of the way for the stuff you do know.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Boocrobes</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/boocrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/boocrobes/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Boocrobes on Boocrobes allows you to read ebooks in the EPUB format using personalised comprehension aids, including when you are offline. The module is a (very slightly) adapted version of the amazing open source javascript &amp;ldquo;Readium V2&amp;rdquo; R2D2BC reader developed by Aferdita Muriqi, with the addition of the special Transcrobes sauce that connects you to the model the system has of your language knowledge. The integration is not yet perfect, so you may need to refresh the page occasionally if the formatting does something strange.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Brocrobes</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/brocrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/brocrobes/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Brocrobes on Brocrobes is a browser extension that allows you to enrich any webpage with the your own, personalised help. When you click on the extension button, the extension will look for all text in the language you are learning on the page, and send that to the server. The server will then get context-based definitions for all the words, and translations for all the sentences, and send that back to the browser.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Brocrobes Privacy Information</title>
      <link>/page/install/clients/brocrobes-chrome-privacy/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/install/clients/brocrobes-chrome-privacy/</guid>
      <description>Preambule Brocrobes is intended to allow you to read any text in the foreign language you are learning, no matter what your level in that language is. That is a quite revolutionary idea compared with most previous language learning, which has tried to find or create texts with certain types of words and grammatical structures that are supposed to be appropriate for learners at a particular level. Learners are all supposed to magically be interested in the same stuff, and the same stuff is supposed to be at the right level, no matter what the learning background of the learner is.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Brocrobes Privacy Information</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/clients/brocrobes-chrome-privacy/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/clients/brocrobes-chrome-privacy/</guid>
      <description>Preambule Brocrobes is intended to allow you to read any text in the foreign language you are learning, no matter what your level in that language is. That is a quite revolutionary idea compared with most previous language learning, which has tried to find or create texts with certain types of words and grammatical structures that are supposed to be appropriate for learners at a particular level. Learners are all supposed to magically be interested in the same stuff, and the same stuff is supposed to be at the right level, no matter what the learning background of the learner is.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Browser extension</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/clients/brocrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/clients/brocrobes/</guid>
      <description>Transcrobes on the Web Transcrobes includes a Chrome browser extension brocrobes. You can install the extension from the Chrome Web Store. If you haven&amp;rsquo;t already:
Sign up for free to be a part of Transcrobes today
Connecting to the Transcrobes Server You will need to connect the extension to the server with the server URL, your username and password. Get in touch with your server admin for information on getting those.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Clients</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/clients/home/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/clients/home/</guid>
      <description>There are now two main ways to interact with Transcrobes - the interactive website and the Chrome browser extension.
Many more integrations are planned, such as for online video streaming platforms (Netflix, Youtube, etc.). Here you will find links to installation and configuration documentation for client applications, and up-to-date information on what applications we plan to support in the near future.
Throughout the site, &amp;ldquo;Chrome (and compatible)&amp;rdquo; means Chromium-based browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Yandex Browser, vanilla Chromium, etc.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Contact</title>
      <link>/page/contact/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/contact/</guid>
      <description>The project currently uses Github project issues and Github project discussions as the main forms of communication.
Inappropriate behaviour If you feel you have been the victim inappropriate behaviour or have noticed it somewhere, then please get in touch with the project team via the email: not.ok at transcrob.es.
Maintainers You can also contact the maintainers directly if you prefer email.
Name Project role Contact email Anton Melser Maintainer anton at transcrob.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Contribute</title>
      <link>/page/contribute/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/contribute/</guid>
      <description>For Everyone Learning a language is an amazing journey of discovery, that can and should be one of the most enriching, pleasurable and exciting experiences anyone ever has. The Transcrobes project wants to be a part of that and is dedicated to keeping a postive atmosphere and being fully inclusive. The project and all sub-projects adhere strictly to the Contributor Covenant, to make sure that everyone feels welcome and safe at all times.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Development</title>
      <link>/page/development/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/development/</guid>
      <description>Basics After spending quite a bit of time setting up properly on Gitlab, it was decided to move to Github. Basically get in touch with the maintainer if you are interested and have some development experience.
There is an (incomplete) backlog of stuff needing to be developed.
Communication The three main forms of communication are the Discord, via issues on the Github issue tracker, or on the Github discussion list. If you are new, please make sure you have discussed with a regular committer/maintainer BEFORE you start working to avoid any time-wasting and frustration.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>FAQ</title>
      <link>/page/faq/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/faq/</guid>
      <description>For Everyone Current Status Transcrobes currently only fully supports learning Chinese for English speakers. If your English is very good then you should be Ok, but otherwise you&amp;rsquo;re better to wait until your preferred language has been implemented. Partial support was developed for Chinese learners of English but has since been put on stand-by. It will be brought back when Chinese for English speakers support is first-class.
How do I install Transcrobes?</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Install</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/home/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/home/</guid>
      <description>Sign up for free to learn using Transcrobes today
Transcrobes has both server components and client components. As the audiences for each family of components is different, documentation has been separated into two sections:
For normal learners Install the learning tools documentation
For system admins and open source enthusiasts Server installation documentation</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Learn</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/home/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/home/</guid>
      <description>See here for more details on the scientific theories behind the Transcrobes project.
Understanding language learning You can find detailed getting started information for beginners, or for advanced Beginners+. These pages give (quite long) introductions into many aspects of language learning that you might not think of but are important if you want to learn efficiently, so when you have some spare time, you should take a few moments to read through them.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Moocrobes</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/moocrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/moocrobes/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Moocrobes on Authentic video, particularly supported by subtitles, can be a highly effective language learning tool. Normal players, however, are not optimised for language learning, and subtitles are either in the language of the video or the native language of the viewer. Also, very few platforms enrich subtitles with hypertext features (clickable definitions, etc.) and no other platforms gloss only the words that the learner doesn&amp;rsquo;t know.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Notrobes</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/notrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/notrobes/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Notrobes on Notrobes allows you to search for words (individual characters that are not words and radicals coming soon), and gives you significant amounts of information about those words, including your interaction with them.
Using Notrobes Simply enter a word in the language you are learning into the word entry textbox and the system will go off and get tons of information about the word and the component parts of the word.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Privacy centre</title>
      <link>/page/privacy/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/privacy/</guid>
      <description>Privacy pages The Transcrobes project contains several sub-projects. Some of these sub-projects have distinct privacy implications and issues, so require specific information. This page provides links to each of the separate privacy pages to allow users/learners to quickly get answers to their privacy-related questions.
Application-specific privacy pages Brocrobes Transcrobes server </description>
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    <item>
      <title>Repetrobes</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/repetrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/repetrobes/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Repetrobes on Repetrobes is a digital flashcard (spaced repetition system), originally inspired by Anki, and also (currently) using a modified version of the SuperMemo 2 algorithm.
Work has started on a very significantly optimised, personalised, behaviour-based, AI-powered version, which will be integrated soon. This new version will take into account all the information the system has on you, not just your responses in the tool, making it a LOT more accurate and powerful.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Supported Languages</title>
      <link>/page/supported-languages/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/supported-languages/</guid>
      <description>Prerequisites In order for a language pair to be properly supported by the system, two things (currently) need to be accessible and integrated:
A parts-of-speech parser needs to exist for the learning language. The system (currently) uses the open source Stanford CoreNLP, which (currently) supports English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish and Arabic. Adding support for those learning languages is thus relatively trivial, and probably covers 70-80% of the second languages that people commonly learn.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Textcrobes</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/textcrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/textcrobes/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Textcrobes on Sometimes you need to read text that is not in one of the other supported formats, like from a PDF or MS Word document. In these cases, as long as you can copy and paste the text, you can paste it into Textcrobes and get all the great tools and formatting options you have in the other reading tools.
You can also see your progress on the vocabulary (and soon grammar) contained in the video, and get some idea how difficult it might be for you now, and how that will change in the future if you continue your great work!</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Transcrobes website</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/clients/transcrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/clients/transcrobes/</guid>
      <description>Before you begin After clicking on Initialise, the system will install the data and then take you to the dashboard</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Engineering L2</title>
      <link>/post/engineering-l2/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/engineering-l2/</guid>
      <description>This post is in a series of posts discussing issues of a &amp;ldquo;new&amp;rdquo; theory of SLA - Meaningful IO.
Theorising vs Doing One of the things that you learn &amp;ldquo;down in the trenches&amp;rdquo;, doing actual software engineering on real world problems, is that theories about the world almost always can&amp;rsquo;t just be implemented as-is in software and solve a problem in an optimal way. Theorising of any kind necessarily needs to to abstract away some of the details and will focus on a particular aspect or set of aspects.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Anton&#39;s PhD thesis</title>
      <link>/post/phd/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/phd/</guid>
      <description>I (Anton) have been accepted to develop the ideas in this project for a PhD thesis at the Linguistics and Translation department of the City University of Hong Kong from September 2019. While it is not certain that this particular code-base will be developed for the PhD, the PhD work will be open source, and there is no particular reason for it not to build on the existing code.
This means I will be working on this (or an equivalent) project for the next four years!</description>
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    <item>
      <title>English support</title>
      <link>/post/english-support/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/english-support/</guid>
      <description>UPDATE: 2020-12-01 English support has been temporarily removed in order to focus fully on Chinese. If there is significant community interest, that could always change.
Preliminary support for Chinese learners of English has been implemented and is now available for testing. As expected, integrating a second language pair required basically rewriting the entire system to be able to handle any input and output language.
That said, the inflectional characteristics of English are a new challenge for the system and have not been fully integrated.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Migrating to Kubernetes</title>
      <link>/post/migrating-to-kube/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 17 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/migrating-to-kube/</guid>
      <description>This is Part 3 of a mini-series of my experiences getting Transcrobes migrated from separate server apps on a 4gig Alibaba Cloud VM to microk8s on the same VM, and automating (almost) everything with Gitlab CI.
Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Kubernetes Migration Woes nginx-ingress I was coming from a setup where I knew the component parts (Apache + mod_wsgi) pretty well. I haven&amp;rsquo;t been working on high-load web stuff for over 8 years now, and always thought that nginx was a lot of hype for not much benefit.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Single-User Production on Microk8s</title>
      <link>/post/single-user-prod-microk8s/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/single-user-prod-microk8s/</guid>
      <description>This is Part 1 of a mini-series of my experiences getting Transcrobes migrated from separate server apps on a 4gig Alibaba Cloud VM to microk8s on the same VM, and automating (almost) everything with Gitlab CI.
Introduction Microk8s is a kube-in-a-box distribution sponsored by Ubuntu, and in this blog post I recount my experiences getting my own personal Transcrobes installation migrated to a Kubernetes Helm chart and running on it on a 4GB VM on Alibaba Cloud in China.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Hello, World!</title>
      <link>/post/2018-11-26-hello-world/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/2018-11-26-hello-world/</guid>
      <description>This blog post announces the official open-sourcing of the (brand new) Transcrobes project. Code is available for all components on Gitlab.
Some ideas were originally posted to Blogger before the code was open-sourced. Future blogposts on the project by the maintainers should happen directly on https://transcrob.es.
Transcrobes proposes a new paradigm for language learning, one that finally puts each individual language learner at the centre of everything. Content-based instruction, extensive reading and other modern approaches have been pushing in this direction for several decades, Transcrobes is an open source project that takes this approach to the logical conclusion.</description>
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    <item>
      <title></title>
      <link>/page/code_of_conduct/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/code_of_conduct/</guid>
      <description>Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct Our Pledge In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
Our Standards Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include:</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Configure</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/home/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/home/</guid>
      <description>Common data and configuration tasks Name Task Type Status Comments reader settings Reader config available Personlise the reading aids imports Data/Content import available Supported formats: TXT, CSV, epub (v3), SRT, VTT (more soon) user dictionaries Dictionary management available Override system defaults with personalised meaning/translation providers vocabulary bootstrap Known vocabulary input available Quickly teach the system what you know exports Data export available Word-level and daily activity exports (more soon) word lists Define meaningful vocabulary/grammar sets Vocabulary available Grammar lists available soon goals Define personal goals Basic availability Goals based on single lists and basic progress information available.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Contents</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/contents/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/contents/</guid>
      <description>Contents are created by first importing a supported file format, and then telling the system to enrich them. After enriching you can use boocrobes to read ebooks and moocrobes to watch videos.
Enriching is a complex process that makes sure all of the content has been properly analysed and that you have all the data you need to get maximum value, including all the glosses, parts of speech and soon grammar.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Dashboard</title>
      <link>/page/software/learn/dashboard/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/learn/dashboard/</guid>
      <description>The Dashboard gives you an entry point to all the application functions and a high level view of some progress indicators.
The &amp;ldquo;Goals Progress&amp;rdquo; widget gives a quick idea of how you are doing with all your Goals in one place.
Later on you will be able to personalise what information you put on the Dashboard but for the moment we are repeating the &amp;ldquo;Known Words and Characters&amp;rdquo; graph you can also find on the Stats page</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Enrichment</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/enrichment/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/enrichment/</guid>
      <description>A primary goal of the system is to &amp;ldquo;increase the bandwidth to the brain&amp;rdquo; - giving you exactly the extra information you need to be able to understand and also to learn most efficiently.
Tip
The page has information on how the system works under the hood. It is not required if you just want to use the system.
The system is able to give detailed, personalised help for each word (and soon grammatical patterns too) because of two things.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Experimental Server</title>
      <link>/page/meaningful-io/experiment/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/meaningful-io/experiment/</guid>
      <description>Scientific validation of Transcrobes and Meaningful IO Transcrobes is an open source project and is the main means of collecting data for the Meaningful IO academic (PhD) research project. The project is lead by PhD candidate Anton MELSER and supervised by Dr John LEE.
In order to validate both the theory and implementation of it in code, an installation of the Transcrobes codebase is made available to experimental subjects to use without charge until at least the conclusion of the research in August 2023.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Exporting user data</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/exports/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/exports/</guid>
      <description>You can currently export all the data that the system records and processes about your activity on the platform. These are exported in CSV format, and could be used in a spreadsheet app like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel for making more complicated graphs than we provide today. Don&amp;rsquo;t forget to send us your suggestions if you think you have a graph that others might like, so we can implement it directly on the platform.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Glossing types</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/glossing/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/glossing/</guid>
      <description>You can configure these options wherever that makes sense on the content screens.
Because all learners have different language backgrounds, glossing with another language may not be the best way for you to understand and learn, so a few other options are currently provided. This is one of the active research aspects of the platform - what are the best glossing techniques for learners, if they have a choice between several?</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Goals</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/goals/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/goals/</guid>
      <description>One of the key philosophical drivers behind Transcrobes is learner freedom. Traditional approaches typically have a very rigid idea about what every learner is like and what they should learn, and they don&amp;rsquo;t particularly care that learners are actually people, rather than &amp;ldquo;scientific abstractions&amp;rdquo; or customers. Transcrobes puts each individual learner in the driver&amp;rsquo;s seat. The learner knows what their macro-level goals are, and Transcrobes is here to help the learner achieve those in a fun and highly efficient way.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Importing lists and content</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/imports/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/imports/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Imports on Supported formats Name Use case Details Supported Extensions CSV Word lists for monitoring exam progress or training the system on what you know Comma separated plain text files .csv TEXT Copy/paste from an unsupported format (like Word or PDF) Content files in plain text .txt SUBS Watch Chinese language video Find subtitles on sites like opensubtitles.org and import .srt, .vtt EBOOK Reading Chinese language books International standard format for eBooks .</description>
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    <item>
      <title>k3s</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/server/k3s/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/server/k3s/</guid>
      <description>Who should install Transcrobes on k3s? k3s is a curl-to-Kubernetes install, intended to make setting up a Kubernetes cluster on a single physical machine or VM easy and relatively painless for development or non-critical CI tasks. It was not initially intended to be used for production but is very handy in edge scenarios, and turned out to be very stable.
That said, if you don&amp;rsquo;t have access to a Kubernetes cluster you can set up k3s on a single machine of a set of machines (with auto-failover multi-master), so it is a perfect way to get started with Transcrobes.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Listrobes</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/listrobes/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/listrobes/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Listrobes on Listrobes is an input interface that allows you to indicate how well you know words very quickly. It can be used with or without the imports system to very quickly train the system, meaning onboarding can be very quick.
By default the system presents you with a list of the most common words, most common first, according to the University of Ghent &amp;ldquo;Open Subtitles ZH&amp;rdquo; (SUBTLEX-CH) list.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Meaningful IO</title>
      <link>/page/meaningful-io/home/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/meaningful-io/home/</guid>
      <description>Meaningful IO presents an empiracally testable model of second language learning. The theory draws together several strands of empiracally collected data and puts them under a &amp;ldquo;social&amp;rdquo; lense. The motivation for Meaningful IO is to provide a theoretical basis for the design and implementation of highly efficient and enjoyable digital technologies for language learning.
An official statement of the hypothesis can be found here.
Discussion of the many, many contributing factors to language learning performance will also be posted on the project blog.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Meaningful IO</title>
      <link>/page/meaningful-io/intro/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/meaningful-io/intro/</guid>
      <description>The Meaningful IO (Input/Output) Theory of L2 Acquisition The necessary and sufficient condition for language acquisition is &amp;ldquo;Meaningful Input&amp;rdquo;. Given sufficient Meaningful Input and appropriate communicative contexts, a learner will start producing &amp;ldquo;Meaningful Output&amp;rdquo;, providing evidence that language acquisition has taken place.
Meaningful Input (MI) is defined as input that is comprehensible enough for the learner to partake in an activity that has real utility for the individual. &amp;ldquo;Real utility&amp;rdquo; is defined in terms of psychological and emotional identity imperatives - psychologically and/or emotionally meaningful - that includes both those things that the individual wants to do (enjoys doing, desires, etc.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Preferences</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/preferences/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/preferences/</guid>
      <description>The preferences page allows you to configure the system with any system-wide preferences that aren&amp;rsquo;t directly related to a given tool (e.g, Repetrobes-specific preferences are configured directly in the tool).
Dark mode Dark mode is now fully supported. There is a known issue personalising text and gloss colour in boocrobes that is being worked on.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Reader Settings</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/reader-settings/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/reader-settings/</guid>
      <description>Each interface allows you to configure the reading aids (including for subtitles) in a fairly standard way, with some additions where that makes sense.
Each content screen has a button to take you to the specific configuration for it. Have a play and find what works for you best!
Main font configuration Here you can choose to override the default fonts in the interfaces where that makes sense, like boocrobes and moocrobes.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Server</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/server/home/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/server/home/</guid>
      <description>The server part of Transcrobes runs on Kubernetes. In order to use Transcrobes properly, you will need to have a Kubernetes cluster that is accessible from the internet (or can at least access your DNS provider). For development and small-scale testing, Transcrobes can be run on k3s, which allows you to run a full cluster on a single machine, or scale up with more nodes as needed.
Supported Platforms The following table gives an indication of the level of testing and support of Transcrobes on various common Kubernetes platforms, with links to detailed setup and configuration information, where it exists:</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Server Privacy</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/server/server-privacy/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/server/server-privacy/</guid>
      <description>Transcrobes Server Privacy Information Preambule Transcrobes is a new, radically personalised way of learning language. Transcrobes does that by collecting lots of information about your activities when you are interacting with material in the language you are learning. With this information it creates and maintains an accurate model of your knowledge - a digital representation of your linguistic self - and uses that model to predict what help to give you in order to let you interact with any real material you want to.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>System Actions</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/system/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/system/</guid>
      <description>Warning
Whenever a new version is deployed you will need to first refresh the browser page (refresh button, F5, etc.) and then close the browser. Transcrobes makes heavy use of &amp;ldquo;service workers&amp;rdquo;, which need all browser tabs to be closed before taking effect. On Android, you may also need to clear the browser from memory, as Google is very aggressive in caching and this sometimes means it won&amp;rsquo;t perform the refresh.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>The Language Conspiracy</title>
      <link>/post/superpowers/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/post/superpowers/</guid>
      <description>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) Reification is part of normal usage of natural language (just like metonymy for instance), as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy. According to Alfred North Whitehead, one commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion, or concept about the way things are for a physical or &amp;ldquo;concrete&amp;rdquo; reality: &amp;ldquo;There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>User Dictionaries</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/userdictionaries/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/userdictionaries/</guid>
      <description>Personalised dictionaries may be imported and used with various parts of the system, including the comprehension aids (glosses, mouseovers, popups, etc.) and active learning tools (Repetrobes, etc.).
The system currently supports importing dictionaries in the CSV format with a fixed format. In-place editing of dictionaries will be made available at a later date.
Import options Column and field separators Import file structure The files imported MUST be in CSV format (and have a .</description>
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    <item>
      <title>User Setup</title>
      <link>/page/software/install/server/user-setup/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/install/server/user-setup/</guid>
      <description>For Users Currently, Transcrobes system administrators can chose whether to activate signup through the project website or not. They will either just give you the signup URL, or provide you with all the details you need.
If you would like to take part in the Meaningful IO Research project, please follow the instructions here to see whether spaces are still available.
Please refer to the setup documentation for each client application for details on setting up each individual application, available here</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Word lists</title>
      <link>/page/software/configure/wordlists/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>anton@transcrob.es (Anton Melser)</author>
      <guid>/page/software/configure/wordlists/</guid>
      <description>Discover how to use Wordlists on Wordlists are created by importing and analysing texts, then directing the system to create a list from the imported data. Texts can be simple lists of words (CSV or TXT are currently supported, more soon), or actual content (currently EPUB ebooks and SRT/VTT subtitles formats are supported, more soon). That makes it easy to both study lists like you might get for an exam, or a chapter in a textbook, but also content.</description>
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  </channel>
</rss>