Concerning My Unofficial Version of LWT
#post
This post originally appeared on Blog 2.0
LWT is a powerful language learning tool if used appropriately. One problem I face, however, is that the official version lacks features from a few forks from GitHub, whereas forks are often obsolete. After looking through the code, which proved rather difficult to understand for my untrained PHP eyes, I attempted, to the best of my ability, some modifications to make LWT fit my need.
But first of all, the credit should go to lang-learn-guy for pulling this off — it’s an amazing tool from yet another one person orchestra. Also, a lot of work have been done by open-source contributors to improve this tool.
Note that this post is not intended to be a continuation of LWT but rather a medium to document and share some tweaks that I find useful. Since I don’t know PHP, my work is very limited here.
In brief, changes include:
- A new theme with a less distracting colour scheme
- Status distribution charts in log scale to improve readability
- Thinner frames for a more minimal look
- Bring back unknown word percentage
- Fix bulk new word lookup when translator is not set to google translate
- Disabled dictionary URI check to allow Mac users to use the built-in dictionary by setting the URI to
dict:///### - Disabled text to speech (I can’t get it to work at all and it crashes the backend every time)
The source code is available here
Note that this version uses MAMP configuration by default. To use other PHP environment, delete connect.inc.php and rename one of connect_easyphp.inc.php or connect_wordpress.inc.php or connect_xampp.inc.php to connect.inc.php
Unfortunately I haven’t figured out a way to port LWT to a newer PHP version so PHP 5 is still required. Anyhow happy language learning; remember that brain is more important than gears, so I am going to stop stop exploring and start exploiting.
Just an update of what may be added next:
- Reimplement text to speech using say.js
- Add setting to toggle status chart scale
- Fix log scale to reflect the number 1 in status charts