Custom Danish dictionary 🔎

Background

I realized I was jumping between three different apps to learn new Danish words:

  1. WordFinder (Danish to English translation – very accurate)
  2. Den Danske Ordbog (Definitions in Danish, declension of nouns / adjectives and pronunciation)
  3. 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
Screenshot

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)