I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course.
Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki.
One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML tags to style the resulting Anki notes.
This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.
I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much. And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a satisfactory experience.
All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going to be useful for someone other than me.
But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by something and I create something for me, and this makes all the rest bearable.
I like to do this!
Here's one I made for British Sign Language by scraping signbsl.com: https://github.com/sandbach/bsl-gcse
And an Arabic one by scraping Reverso: https://github.com/sandbach/arabic_vocabulary
> I decided to go for Python
Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt + Rust & Svelte).
What type of job does sales of Anki decks? I never though this to be have like a market, so curious to know
https://refold.la/category/decks/
In Japanese learning, people sell premade decks for things like learning kanji with mnemonics and graphics, or curriculum-like decks that provide a sensible order such as N+1 sentences (sentences with at most one unknown word or kanji)
I'm also in the business of generating Anki decks, except on the tools side: https://reader.manabi.io is growing in popularity for Japanese sentence mining for Anki on iOS & macOS
My project began as a "blissful" side project and is now my full-time occupation.
Interesting app, I haven't heard of Manabi before! How does it compare to other apps like Jidousho? And other, more general desktop tools like Yomitan? On mobile, I'm currently using Yomitan on Firefox for mining, but I'm curious about other mobile-specific approaches and apps that people have made.
Compared with Yomitan, a couple quick differences that come to mind:
- Manabi tracks the words and kanji you've read to show you which are new to you, and which you have as flashcards. You can see this visually on the page, and in a vocab listing
- Review flashcards that appear in whatever you're trying to read. Soon I will also have it auto-review flashcards passively as you read and encounter them naturally
- Add flashcards to Manabi Flashcards or to Anki including AnkiMobile on iOS
- One-tap words to look up instead of mouseover from starting boundary
- Manabi packages reading tools such as RSS, EPUB and soon manga (via Mokuro) with user-editable curated libraries of content. Yomitan is less of a standalone-capable tool
I am working on adding Yomitan dictionaries now (to also make the app multilingual) as well as more integrations such as 2-way sync with Anki, WaniKani, JPDB
I think Jidoujisho has a lot of similarities but it's not an iOS/macOS app
I should put up some product comparison material as there are a lot of tools out there
Ah I didn't realize you also had a macOS app out! Also cool to see you're on HN! I honestly love the niche that we're in.
Hi! Maybe you saw my old app before I rewrote it fully in SwiftUI. Yes it's a nice supportive community to be in
It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you. Everything you described automating is something at least thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about the code quality if it works.
I'm really not sure: it's highly specialized to scrape the pages of that particular course and output it in my own HTML and CSS classes. Luckily for me, their format is quite standard across chapters, but may not be across courses, and I didn't write the code to be modular or adaptive given my need (and the fact that I'm learning Python, not application design).
Still, the code lives in a git repo, so it's not excluded that I'll make it evolve to something more generic and maintainable in the future. But today, it's my own little dirty code that I will jealously keep and hide like that lewd drawing I did when I was a teenager.