Elephant: A First Release
Announcement for the first release of Elephant and a the features it ships.
This announcement is late. Very late. I wanted to write it anyway, even though I prefer working on features to writing.
Elephant is open to everyone!
The first public release of Elephant has a few basic features driven by others that I want to give a shout-out to.
The dictionary functionality is driven by the open data of the Korean Learners Dictionary. It’s an amazing resource, and I happily keep everything open that works on the data or, if it becomes necessary, changes the data.
Beyond the dictionary, Elephant offers a sentence search feature. This allows everyone to search sentences with certain vocabulary or grammar patterns. The corpus is created through user input and a set of initial sentences from Tatoeba, another great open resource.
Building on these two datasets, Elephant’s true aim is supporting studying, not just lookup. The core features Elephant starts with are:
- Sentence Analysis
- Translating Sentences
- Flashcards
- Pronunciation Training
Internally, Elephant makes use of Anki’s amazing work on FSRS to track progress for vocabulary.
For subscribers, Elephant offers AI-based grading of translations and pronunciation. The AI support can be turned off if desired; free and paid accounts can ask a friend or teacher to grade their work via a shareable link.
If you just want to see the analysis at work or share one with someone, you can use Elephants Demo.
Over time, I hope to add many more tasks to get closer to Elephants’ ambition: Any task you might find on an exam or workbook, you will find on Elephant - and more. A few I am currently working on are more extensive number exercises, writing a free sentence for given vocabulary, listening practice with dictation and understanding (only at the level of a sentence) and more.
How these new features will land in Elephant, who gets access in which order and more will be handled in the next blog post.
- David