Custom Danish dictionary 🔎
Short story and explanation behind ordbog.tmlmt.com
Background
I realized I was jumping between three different apps to learn new Danish words:
- WordFinder (Danish to English translation – very accurate)
- Den Danske Ordbog (Definitions in Danish, declension of nouns / adjectives and pronunciation)
- Google Translate – or equivalent (Danish to French translation)
In addition, I find the way declension is shown on Den Danske Ordbog not very straight-forward, so I was spending a few seconds converting the info into a word I could memorize (I have a visual memory).
And therefore thought about merging all of that into one web app.
The result
The result is a single search webpage available at https://ordbog.tmlmt.com where one can type in a word and find:
- Declensions of a noun in all its forms (definite, plural, etc.)
- Declensions of an adjective in all its forms (t-form, n-form, etc.)
- Declensions of a verb in its 3 basis forms (present, preteritum, participium)
- Pronunciation (both phonetics and audio)
- Translation in English
- Translation in French
Technology
- Front-end: Vue.js (Javascript Framework) + bootstrap
- Back-end: Flask (Micro Web Framework / Python) + requests + BeautifulSoup
The front-end asks the back-end to search for word: which it does by scraping ordnet.dk/ordbog and dict.com, the two sources for the info I need.
List of improvement ideas
- Conjugate verbs
- List the possible prepositions for nouns and verbs
- If a word is not found, give suggestions of nearby words (from DDO)
- Provide a link to Wikipedia
- Better source for translations (dict.com is not always reliable)