latrine

curses-based LAnguage TRaINEr

LaTrine is a curses-based LAnguage TRaINEr. It takes a dictionary and asks you for a word or a phrase, and you try to give the correct answer. You can choose in what direction LaTrine shall ask, and the selection of the words or phrases will depend on how often you don't know the correct translation for the respective phrase. This is a conventional way to drill yourself in foreign language vocabulary. LaTrine provides full UTF-8 support for non-ASCII characters, entering of digraphs, keyboard mappings for foreign alphabets, as well as right-to-left input and output, e.g. for Hebrew. The program features several localizations. LaTrine's upstream homepage can be found at http://people.debian.org/~godisch/latrine/. In addition to this package you need an appropriate dictionary. Writing your own word list is the easiest and recommended way, but you may also download one from the internet. The Free Dictionaries Project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedict/, provides dictionaries for about 50 language combinations, which should be compatible with LaTrine. These dictionaries are also available via the Debian dict-freedict-*-* packages.