captain

Awesome Tool for Learning English

What is it?

Captain is a smart clipboard recorder, a dictionary and a vocabulary builder which is created deliberately for learning English.

Features

1. Smart Clipboard Recorder

Captain monitors the clipboard and extracts the word and the sentence which the word exists wisely. Why? Because it is essential to record the word and the sentence in which you stuck and can’t recognize when you read English articles or English novels. If you can learn words from a vivid or meaningful sentence in which you stuck other than a trivial example from a dictionary, you would gain much efficiency when learning English.

2. Word Prototype

Caption could automatically obtain prototype of a word from a derived form. And this is crucial for subsequent function. After all, you would probably want to query word ‘get’ other than ‘got’.

3. Automatic pronunciation

Want to listen to word pronunciation but too lazy to open other app and click pronunciation button? Or even worse you have to open a web browser and search the certain word manually? How can you bear the low efficiency? Now, you have Caption, Captain would release you from the annoying dilemma. The only thing you need to do is to copy the word, and the pronunciation would automatically be emitted. And it is necessary here to declare that all of the pronunciations are downloaded from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/, so thanks for their great work sincerely.

4. Automatic notification

Just like automatic pronunciation, when you finished the step of copying a word, after a short time, the word definition would pop up with the form of notification. Cool!

5. Kindle Exporter

For convenience, Captain is able to automatically export the words in ‘mastered’ category on Kindle vocabulary builder to a local file, and it will delete those on Kindle and synchronize to Kindle. But currently, you need manually reboot Kindle after exporting to make change valid.

6. Review Words Learned

For memorizing words learned in a convenient way, Captain supports a deliberate approach to help you which selects word randomly from the words you learned to present at a random time within an hour.

7. Dictionary

Captain, of course, is able to look up words. As a matter of fact, Captain requests and gets word definition from website http://dict.youdao.com/, then it will record the definition in a local dictionary file. so thanks for youdao’s great work sincerely.

8. Vocabulary Builder

Captain is originally designed as an assistant partner of Kindle E-reader.Frankly, I think Kindle is awesome to learning English. When we look up words on Kindle, they are automatically added to the Vocabulary Builder on the device. With Vocabulary Builder, we can use flashcards to learn the definitions and usage of words. But as a long term user, I think Kindle has a serious shortcoming which is a lack of excellent management functionary of vocabulary builder, and this is why I created this project originally.

Install requirements

sh install.sh

Requirements

OS: macOS

Browser: Chrome should be installed.

Running the app

sh run.sh

How to use

Once you have done the above steps. You can use now.

For recording the vocabulary and the sentence where you stuck, first you should copy the word and then the sentence in which the word reside. That’s all you need to do. Now the word has been stored properly associated with its definition, you can access and review at http://127.0.0.1:9527/learn_english.

For exporting the vocabulary which in category ‘mastered’ on Kindle, you just need to plug in you Kindle and issue the command sh run.sh or if you have executed that command, you should issue sh rerun.sh instead.

For listening to word pronunciation, copy the word outright. Then the pronunciation would continually ring out for four times.

Captain works perfectly with a Chrome plguin which is called “Auto Copy”, and the address is “https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bijpdibkloghppkbmhcklkogpjaenfkg”

Feedback

This is an early project and there will be breaking changes. However, discussions and contributions are welcome. Please feel free to experiment and come back with suggestions/issues to make this project more useful and more powerful. Thanks.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

License

BSD 3-Clause License

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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