It would be nice to have an option to find all words in all levels for a given topic, analysis or in the dictionary.

Currently not bold enough on some screens/browsers.

They are work in progress or incomplete but then should not show up on the website.

The female voice works, but the male one does not. I think we have two options:

1. set the default to female and leave everything else the same.
2. Set the voice to female in the code and remove the choice from the user interface.

This is the case for e.g. beginning of a sentence.

Can they be alphabetized so that they come in the same order in all levels?

Organization re-branded to https://diku.no.

Please see attached screenshot: There is an item here that is not highlighted but should be: книги

The buttons for Next word, Previous word, and translation are missing for these two. Please see the attached screen shots. The combinations are A1 + животные/растения and A1 + погода.

I received the following message on the facebook page I set up for the SMARTool from someone named Lars Aronsson:
“The sound (green speaker icon) works for a male voice of the phrase “Ване двадцать пять лет”, but for no other phrases. (I'm using the Firefox browser on Linux.)”
I don't have any way to verify whether there is really such a problem myself, I am not a Linux user, nor a Firefox user.
--laura

Then list all sentences with the words boldfaced.

Experiment with https://responsivevoice.org/api/.

In other words, the goal is to have the entire list of vocabulary items in alphabetical order, listing the Lemma in column A (used also for alphabetization), and the English gloss in column C – this for each Level (so a dictionary for A1, for A2, etc, and possibly one for all four levels)?

This happened after upstream API change.

I'd suggest to add a link to the sources on Github. It doesn't have to be very prominent, maybe even only in the "about" panel.
As a little "sub-issue", would it make sense to link the logos in the bottom to the organizations' websites?

Now that SMARTool is to become a family rather than just being a tool for English-speaking learners of Russian, perhaps we need to modify the site so that it identifies which SMARTool one is located at? Perhaps a banner that would say something like:
SMARTool for English-speaking learners of Russian
or in its generic version:
SMARTool for [User language]-speaking learners of [Target language].

Please see the attached file.
Fixes to SMARTool Jan 24.docx

Following https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

This will happen 2020-01-15.

We need to add one more person to the Team listed on the About page:
Lisa Kibisova (Higher School of Economics in Moscow): Content

At present we have a system whereby we use abbreviations of grammatical categories like
Imperf.Masc.Sing.Past
that are spelled out in the List of abbreviations and by mouseover, as in this example:
Imperfective Masculine Singular Past
For the original purpose of a SMARTool for Russian, this is ok.
However, I am thinking about other languages like Finnish and North Saami where the number of combinations of grammatical categories is much larger. At that point, it makes more sense to instead list just the building blocks in the List of abbreviations, so that list would only contain individual abbreviations, not combinations, as in:
Imperf = Imperfective
Masc = Masculine
Sing = Singular
Past = Past
And then to have the mouseover “calculate” the spellout from the individual abbreviations rather than listing every one individually.
So it might be better to engineer this now rather than to encounter a problem down the road with languages that present more complex combinations of grammatical categories.
For the sake of Russian, we have a little over 100 combinations already (a few more are possible but not attested in our current dataset). So we can do it either way. But it might make sense to change the programming for Russian also since in the future we might want to expand it and might thus encounter some new combinations.

We need a logo/link to their page.

This can be done by finding the same string that is listed in the column “Form”.

[Notes from our meeting this week with suggestions on how to go forward:]

We would like to suggest a structure for the columns in the input that reflects this.

Terminology:

• Target Language: This is the language that the person is learning (Russian in the original SMARTool)
• User Language: This is the language that the user has as their mother tongue (or is using; English in the original SMARTool)

We suggest retaining the English glosses and translations, but these columns can be empty if the User Language is English.

We suggest the following order of columns, which results in an larger number of columns and changes the number for all columns after column number 2/B.

• Target Language Lemma
• ID
• User Language Gloss
• English Gloss # this is empty if user lg = eng
• POS
• Level
• Word source
• Ex. ID
• Form
• Analysis
• Target Language Example Sentence
• User Language Translation
• Eng translation # empty if user lg = eng
• Reference
• Topic(s)

Note that in addition to the A1, A2, etc. spreadsheets, there is also the sheet with Topics, where once again we need to add a column such that we have the Target Language, the User Language and English (for reference).

Way to reproduce: "all levels" -> "search by dictionary"

Some relevant links:

• https://github.com/valentina-zh/twirll-in-process
• http://emptyprefixes.uit.no
• http://ansatte.uit.no/laura.janda/TWIRLL/SMARTool.html

I have gotten the following message from a colleague:
Takket være en melding av Helene Andreassen på Facebook oppdaget jeg at dere har laget SMARTool. Det ser kjempeflott ut!
Og bra at det er med lyd. Men jeg får ikke lydfilene til å virke, og heller ikke det som skal ligge under spørsmålstegnet ved siden av hver setning. Jeg har prøvd ulike nettlesere. Gjør jeg noe feil?
I explained to her that we are working with the voice synthesizer site to get the sound fixed. But the problem with the question mark (which we had before, if I remember correctly) is back -- when you mouse over, nothing happens.

It seems fine in Chrome.

Strategic Mastery of Russian Tool (SMARTool)

Real data is located at https://github.com/valentina-zh/twirll-in-process.

Also find out where the empty level comes from.

There are two listings of жильё under A1, each with a fairly large number of words. Verify why there are two listing.

We would like to excerpt some portions of the SMARTool for specific lessons for students.

We are in the process of developing a first-semester course in Russian that will be entirely online, called Russisk uten permer. Attached is a file with a plan for this course where the vocabulary is based upon the words in the A1 portion of the SMARTool. The left-most column is the number of each lesson, and in the middle column called Gloser fra SMARTool are the words for each lesson. There are 35 lessons, but two of them do not have vocabulary because they are review lessons (14 and 35). So there are 33 sets of words here that we would like to have excerpted.

We would like to get 33 links to these excerpts, such that each excerpt is its own entity. The excerpts would need to give the possibility of toggling through the given set of words (using the green forward and backward arrows), plus the options of getting translations and voice synthesis, and search through dictionary (which will be very small). It would also be nice to preserve the function that searches by analysis. The search by topic function is probably less useful for such small excerpts. Since all of these words are in A1 and these are excerpts, we do not need (or want) to ask the user to filter by Level.

If at all possible, we would like to get the excerpts for lessons 27, 28, and 29 first, and preferably by Dec 1 2019, since we want to create a pilot that we can test out on our current students.

Does this seem doable?

Is the format in the attached document problematic? If so, I can provide a different format, just say what it is.

--laura

Navigator Russisk uten permer 29_10_19.docx

This isn't exactly an issue, but a question. This is about how we currently use googlesheets and a question of how we could do this in github.
Editing the content of the SMARTool is a big job, and we have been using a system of coloring in the cells to keep track of that. We color in green the cells that have been checked and ok'd, violet for cells where I have made corrections, red for cells where there is a problem that needs to be fixed, and yellow for a problem that has been fixed but still needs to be checked and ok'd. The colors make it easy to find where we are in the process and to find the places where we need to go back and fix things.
Does github allow one to color in cells in a spreadsheet? If so, then we should go entirely over to adding content in github. If not, we should either keep the dual system of googlesheets and github, or come up with some other way to keep track of the editing process in github.

At the SMARTool launch, Svetlana made an excellent suggestion, namely that it would be useful to have the option to choose “all topics” and then toggle through all items. Her suggestion was particularly in connection with the Min russiske reise version, but could be a good idea for the entire eng>rus version, as well as the generic version.
--laura

I suggested that a colleague who is learning Russian should try the SMARTool. She has a PC (not Mac) and she was using Safari. The search by Topics worked, but the other two options did not work.