# The &artikulate; Handbook

Andreas
Cord-Landwehr
cordlandwehr@kde.org
Ondrila
Gupta
oindrila.gupta92@gmail.com
2014
The &artikulate; Developers
2014-03-15
0.3.0 &kde; 4.13
&FDLNotice;

&artikulate; is a pronunciation trainer, which helps in improving and perfecting pronunciation skills. Learners train their pronunciation by recording their own voices and comparing them to native speaker recordings. &artikulate; is part of the &kde; Education Project.

KDE
kdeedu
language
course
unit
phrase
learner profile

## Introduction

&artikulate; is a pronunciation trainer that helps improving and perfecting a learner's pronunciation skills for a foreign language. For this, it provides courses with native speaker recordings of the target language for download. The learner download courses for selected language, selects a group of phrases, starts to record her/his own voice when speaking the phrases himself/herself, and compares the results to the native speaker's recordings by listening to both.

### The Learning Concept

The study concept of this language learning application is as follows. By repeating and comparing own recordings of spoken phrases to the recordings of (a representative set of) native speakers, a learner can

- identify weaknesses when speaking the foreign language and

- adapt the pronunciation to coincide with the native speaker's pronunciation.

For best learning outcome, specifically designed courses for every supported language are necessary. Those courses can concentrate on training special scenarios (like ordering food in a restaurant) but can also focus on learning how to pronounce difficult syllables and words of a particular language correctly.

### First Steps in &artikulate;

This chapter explains how to make the first steps in &artikulate;, especially how to create a learner identity, how to select a language and how to get native speaker recordings to start training.

#### 1. Create a Learner Identity

For every learner, there has to be one learner identity that saves the learning progress. This also allows multiple people to use &artikulate; on the same computer, each being able to have his/her private learning goals. To create a learner identity, click on the Create Learner Identity button (if starting &artikulate; for the first time) or otherwise the button with the name of the currently selected learner identity at the top left of the window. In the opening dialog, then select Create New Learner Identity. You can edit your name with the Edit button and set a picture if you like.

Create a learner identity.

#### 2. Select a Language

Setting the training language(s) of a learner is done in the Favorite Languages tab by activating (clicking at) the languages. The star symbol corresponding to each language will turn colored once it is selected. Close the Learner Identity dialog by selecting your identity with Use Selected Identity. Note that when downloading courses, the course language will automatically be activated for the currently selected learner identity.

Set favorite languages.

#### 3. Download a Language Course

For this tutorial, we assume that we would like to learn Polish and hence that we want to download a course for Polish. You can download courses through File Download New Language Course or by clicking at the orange star at the top right. A download window will appear, listing the available languages provided by the &kde; Community. You can sort through them using the order by functions at the right. We download the Polish course by clicking on Install.

Download course.

#### 4. Start Training

Courses consist of multiple training units, each usually grouping a set of phrases according to a scenario. Select one of the training units available at the left panel, and then click on Start Training.

Select unit and start training.

#### Finish Training / Statistics

After completing through all the phrases in a training unit, you will see a statistics screen for the completed training. You can see how many tries it took for the various types of phrases. The statistics screen is closed by click on the Finish Training button at the top right.

## Screens

### The Training Screen

The training view is the most important view in &artikulate;. Whenever starting a training, this view is opened and will be presented until the training of the selected training unit is finished or the learner stops the training. In the center of this screen, there are controls for playing a native speaker recording, the text of the corresponding phrase, and controls to record and playback the learner's own voice. When a learner judges to be done with training the pronunciation of the current phrase, by clicking OK the current phrase is marked as done and a next phrase is selected. Otherwise, when clicking on Retry Later, a next phrase is selected but the current phrase will be displayed later again.

For training the pronunciation of a current phrase, the learner shall first play the native speaker's recording by pressing at the Playback button at the left. The next step is to press on the Record button and read the presented phrase aloud. A further press on the Record button stops the recording and the recording can then be played with the corresponding Playback button. By listening to both recordings, the learner shall judge if the phrase was pronounced correctly or not. If it was pronounced correctly, clicking on OK marks the phrase as learned and proceeds with the next phrase. Otherwise, if not yet satisfied with the recording, the learner either can retry recording by again clicking on Record or schedule the phrase for later training by clicking on Retry Later.

&artikulate;'s units are composed of a list of phrases of different lengths (words, expressions, sentences, and paragraphs). A learner can see the current learning progress at the bottom when looking at the progress bar. The progress bar also allows switching between phrases.

At any time, the learner can choose to stop training by clicking at the Finish button.

The Training Screen.
Screenshot of the Training Screen.

#### Sound Controls

- Record: Record your pronunciation through your microphone. Click again to stop recording.

- Playback: Play a sound file. If active, click again to stop.

#### Learning Controls

- OK: Mark current phrase as learned and continue with next phrase.

- Retry Later: Continue with training next phrase, but try this phrase later again.

- Stop: Stops the training and proceeds to the statistics view. Current training results are saved to training statistics.

#### Progress Bar

The progress bar displays the learning progress for the current unit. It consists of blocks representing the phrases in the current unit, whereas the color of a block explains the length of the phrase. You can hover over these blocks to see the phrases and click on them to switch the currently trained phrase. Dark elements are already trained, light ones are untrained.

Progress Bar
The progress bar for the current unit.

On top of the progress bar you can see which type of phrases you are currently learning. The available types are:

- word: a single word, letter, or number

- expression: an expression of several words that does not form a complete sentence

- sentence: a complete sentence

- paragraph: several sentences (usually 2-3)

## Editor

The integrated course editor is an advanced tool for language course contributors that allows the creation and collaborative work on language courses for &artikulate;. On the one hand it allows the creation of language courses and recording of the native speaker sound files. On the hand, it enables work on so called skeletons, which are language course prototypes that allow easy and fast creation of new courses derived from a prototype. The editor only edits files outside of the training course set, i.e., the set of courses downloaded in &artikulate;.

### Overview

#### Editor Notions

For the course editor we use a specific set of terms, which is also used for the following descriptions.

Language:

  Languages are only available in &artikulate; if they are given by language specifications.

Course:

  A course is associated to one language and contains a list of units.

Unit:

  A unit consists of phrases that are "somehow" homogeneous. E.g. those can be phrases spoken in a restaurant or phrases spoken at a conversation at the street by a tourist searching for the way.

Course Skeletons:

  A course skeleton forms the prototype of a course. This is, skeletons help to ease creation of courses in several languages as they state a set of units and phrases (in English) that then can be used as a blueprint to create a course in a new language. Updates of course skeletons can also be imported into courses that are created from a skeleton.

Phrases:

  Phrases are given by a text string and a recording by a native speaker. We differ phrases by their lengths. The following phrase lengths exists

  - word: a single word, letter, or number

  - expression: an expression of several words that does not form a complete sentence

  - sentence: a complete sentence

  - paragraph: several sentences (usually 2-3)

A course is associated with a specific language, consists of different units and each unit is given by a sequence of phrases in different lengths.

#### Set Storage Folder/Course Repository

The editor operates within a separate folder (in the following called repository, as it is recommended to be under some version control system). In that folder, the editor searches for editable courses and skeleton files and also stores new files.

The course repository can be set in the configuration dialog. It can be found at Settings Configure &artikulate; and the course settings are at the menu option Course Resources.

Set course repository for editor.

Set course repository for editor.

### Edit a Course

The editor can be started from the main menu with Mode Course Editor mode. There you have the options to work on existing skeleton files or to create new courses or edit existing ones. After selecting a language, you can open an existing course to edit it, or otherwise use New Course to create a new course for this language. In either case, you will be presented the list of units of the course, where you can create new units or open existing ones for edit.

#### Edit a Unit

When opening a unit for editing, you will see the list of its phrases (see below). One line of this list contains the following information:

1. edit button: open this phrase for edit

2. phrase type: icon that denotes the type of this phrase (e.g., word, expression)

3. edit state: a colored block that denotes the edit state of this phrase (red: unknown/no state set; orange: translated state; green: completed state)

4. the phrase

5. exclude button: if course derives from a course skeleton, this button allows excluding the phrase from the unit

Editor View: list of phrases within a unit.

Editor View: list of phrases within a unit.

#### Edit a Phrase

When opening a phrase for editing, you will see the phrase editor as shown below. This edit interface contains the following elements:

- the phrase text as it will be shown in the trainer

- the original phrase, if using a course skeleton

- the edit state of the phrase

- the type/length of the phrase

- recording buttons for the native speaker recordings

- buttons to denote interesting phonemes of the phrase (currently not used in training mode)

You can close the phrase editing interface with to accept the changes you did, or with to discard your changes.

Editor View: editing view for a phrase.

Editor View: editing view for a phrase.

#### Update from Course Prototype

If the currently edited course derives from a skeleton, then the course can be updated from the latest version of the skeleton by using the button Update from Course Prototype at the top left of the screen. This button is deactivated if the course is not derived from a course skeleton.

## Credits and License

&artikulate;

Program Copyright:

- Copyright 2013-2014 Andreas Cord-Landwehr

- Copyright 2013 Oindrila Gupta

- Copyright 2013 Magdalena Konkiewitz

- Copyright 2013-2014 Samikshan Bairagya

Documentation Copyright:

- Copyright 2014 Andreas Cord-Landwehr

&underFDL; &underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &artikulate;

&install.intro.documentation;

### Compilation and installation

&install.compile.documentation;

#### &artikulate; Specific Instructions

Further guidelines on how to compile &artikulate; are available in &artikulate;'s technical documentation at the &kde; TechBase.

&documentation.index;