Almost ready for a public viewing

July 26, 2006 by Oliver
Filed under: Computers, Languages, PHP, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

The still unnamed language learning app is almost ready for a first public viewing. I’m just trying to get some audio of some other than myself. Firstly because I don’t like really hearing my own voice (and for this purpose my less than perfect pronunciation is too obvious) and secondly I need at least two people just for it not to be confusing.

In the meantime I thought I’d share an example of the script file I’m using:

EntschuldigenSie.xml

It primarily contains English translations although one phrase is done in a few more languages.

It does highlight one possible issue. I had to change the German ß to ss. Although Windows seems perfectly fine with Unicode file names (internally it uses Unicode for storage (either UCS2 or UTF-16 – not sure which)) PHP refuses to open them (fopen, file and file_exists for instance just don’t work) and Apache 2 seems to have issues as well. For German there are workarounds but for other languages it will get fiddly. This might not even be a problem on Linux where it will ultimately reside and it only affects file names which only have to give you a rough idea of what’s inside. But still, it’s annoying…

Pimsleur, German, Windows, Apache, Unicode, UTF-16

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Comments

9 Comments on Almost ready for a public viewing

  1. Oliver on Thu, 27th Jul 2006 3:50 pm

    2. I found out how to get to work, you need to set the PHP internal encoding to UTF-8. You need iconv installed to do this (which I have) so the live version with proper character support in filenames will be here soon :D

  2. Any voice talent out there? - Oliver Brown on Mon, 7th Aug 2006 8:01 pm

    3. [...] ere?
    August 7th, 2006 by Oliver

    Foreign language voice talent needed for the still-unnamed language learning application. I have a series of phras [...]

  3. Jason on Tue, 8th Aug 2006 8:05 pm

    4. We may be able to help you out with the voice talent. What are you looking for?

  4. How much fluff is needed? - Oliver Brown on Sun, 13th Aug 2006 11:09 pm

    5. [...] 06 by Oliver

    I’ve been sorting out exactly what needs recording for the language app (which I finally have an idea for a name for) and I was t [...]

  5. Language learning pricing and making it pay for itself - Oliver Brown on Mon, 14th Aug 2006 2:52 pm

    6. [...] 4th, 2006 by Oliver

    If I’m considering paying for voice talent for the language app (which let’s face it, I’m going to have to do [...]

  6. How to learn a language - Oliver Brown on Wed, 23rd Aug 2006 9:38 am

    7. [...] plausible. It’s also made me think about grammar and how it should be handled in my language learning app. At the moment it plays the audio at you withou [...]

  7. Learning a language over Jabber/XMPP - Oliver Brown on Tue, 24th Oct 2006 1:01 pm

    8. [...] earning a language over Jabber/XMPP
    October 24th, 2006 by Oliver

    The language learning app of mine is still under development, but I doubt I&#8 [...]

  8. Language learning app is back on - Oliver Brown on Tue, 17th Apr 2007 9:48 pm

    9. [...] rning app is back on
    April 17th, 2007 by Oliver

    The language learning app which I went on and on about a while ago is now [...]

  9. Handling regional variations in language learning - Oliver Brown on Fri, 27th Apr 2007 5:14 pm

    10. [...] almost identical to a course on Standard French. The question is how to notate that in the script files the language app uses. There are basically three ways I& [...]