Welcome to voca-builder¶
voca-builder is an Emacs package that was developed to help you build up your vocabulary. It automates most of the steps in the process, so that you could
- spent more time in actually memorising learning new words leave the tedious origination tasks for voca-builder.
- focus on your reading with minimal distribution, I.e. switch app and/or check direction.
- smart process that helps you memoerise the new vocabulary.
If you are learning a foreign language, you know how tedious and time-consuming it is to check a new word that you are not familiar with. It breaks you reading-flow, and therefore decrease your efficient.
vocab-builder provides excellent functionality that will do the checking for you, and shows the meaning as a popup above the text that you are reading. It also records the meaning and the sentence containing the word. All you need to do is press a key.
It can also groups the vocabulary an later on, you can export new vocabularies based on tags or time period.
For full documentation on this package, please see the wiki page.
Installation¶
The recommended way to install voca-builder is via package.el, the build-in
package manager in Emacs.
voca-builder.el is available on the major community maintained
repositories http://melpa.org/. You can install voca-builder with the
following command:
M-x package-install [RET] voca-builder [RET]
or by execute this bit of Emacs Lisp code
(unless (package-installed-p 'voca-builder)
(package-install 'voca-builder))
If the installation doesn’t work try to refresh the package list:
M-x package-refresh-contents [RET]
You can also install manually with two steps: first clone this repository, then add the directory containing voca-builder.el to Emacs’s search path as follows:
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/path/to/voca-builder.el/")
(require 'voca-builder)
Configuration¶
To see all the configurable settings in voca-builder, type
M-x customize-group [RET] voca-builder [RET]
and you are able to customise these variables directly. However, the recommended way to do is to add the non-interaactive way.
The important variables are:
- voca-builder/voca-file
- where you wanna to save the new vocabulary and their meanings to, the default is ~/.vocabulary
- voca-builder/current-tag
- which tags should added to the vocabulary nodes. The default is “GENE” (general).
- voca-builder/export-file
- where to save the exported vocabularies.
The following is a sample.
(setq voca-builder/voca-file "~/git/Learning/Emacs_Voca/voca_example.org")
(setq voca-builder/current-tag "Demo")
(setq voca-builder/export-file "~/voca-builder-temp.org")
I read all the time and frequently confront words that I am not
familiar with, so I bind the keystroke F4 to shows the meaning
quickly.
(global-set-key (kbd "<f4>") 'voca-builder/search-popup)
Usage¶
Fetch the meaning¶
If I would like to know what the meaning of search means in English,
I moved the cursor to c under search, and press F4. The meaning
will popup up under the word, as shown below. I don’t have to switch
to a dictionary app and it won’t break my read-flow.
Also, as the echo area shows, the full meaning and also the full sentence will be added to the voca-file.
Here is a real example when I was reading an article.
Export vocabularies by tags¶
It is useful when you want to group vocabularies and revise
them altogether, for example, all the biology terms. You can do it
using voca-builder/extract-by-tags function. For example,
(voca-builder/extract-by-tags "Demo")
will export all the vocabularies that are tagged by “Demo” to ~/voca-builder-temp.org.
Export vocabularies by date¶
You may also want to export all the new vocbaulary you learnt during
one particular period, like a semaster, an academic year using
voca-builder/extract-period function. For example
(voca-builder/extract-period "2015-01-05" "2015-04-01")
will export all the vocabularies that are recorded between “2015-01-05” and “2014-04-01”.
Note you can combine these two function together.
Appendix¶
It Make Your Life Easier¶
Image the process you want to look in a new word, it probably would like this:
- put down the book you reading,
- find the dictionary or open the app,
- repeat step 1-2 few times if the vocabulary is quit complex,
- now you get the meaning, trying to comprehensive it,
- then you write it down in a note book, with the meaning,
- if you are very serious, you probably write down the sentence as an example,
- after all these, you go back to continue reading but lost the flow.
What if you can do the step 1-6 automatically, and immediately as you thought you wanna see what’s the meaning of a word? This is what voca-bulder can do for you, all you need to do is press F4 (the default setting), without leaving Emacs, searching and recording. Sounds pretty cool is it?
Even more important, you can quary your vocbaulary database, and search, for example, if you are prepare an interview in banking sector, you can bring up all the banking related terminology, and study them all together, or you wanna strength your memmoery and wants to remmeber again before you forget, you can bring up all the words you learnt last week, or this month etc.
Human-Friendly Dictionary Database¶
take conciousness for example, definition from oxford is
``[MASS NOUN] The state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings: ``
while for vocabuary.com, it has more human friendly defition, which are for human, and edited by humans.
``When you are awake and aware of your surroundings, that’s consciousness. There are different types of consciousness, including social consciousness, being aware of injustices in society. ``
``The early Latin word conscius meant “with knowing,” but it meant a shared knowledge, a meaning that was retained through the 16th Century. John Locke was the first to describe consciousness in relation to the individual, referring to it as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” If you lose consciousness during the performance, we’ll wake you up with some smelling salts! ``
(org-map-entries ‘yt/org-export-this-header “+ExportFile”)