Learn Languages with Balalingo

Balalingo is a desktop application for foreign language learners to support learning foreign languages with authentic materials. It highlights unknown words in texts, allows you to look them up in a dictionary and can update your newly learnt words from other data sources like Anki.

Let's see an example for that: Let's say you're learning French and want to understand lyrics of French songs. You use Anki to learn French vocabulary.

• You'll first lookup your favorite song on any other website focused on lyrics.
• Paste those lyrics into Balalingo. You can leave the language to auto-detect or switch to French.
• Balalingo fetches your vocabulary knowledge from Anki.
• If Anki does not include each and every word you know, you can mark sections of text as already known inside Balalingo.
• Balalingo can lookup the meaning for all unknown words with a dictionary, e.g. PONS.
• You add those words to your Anki deck and learn them.
• Profit. You should know be able to understand the lyrics, at least if you know the required grammar. :-)

Balalingo uses text analysis (some people nowadays would say AI...) to make sure that words with different inflections are considered the same word (e.g. runs and running).

NLParrot

Balalingo is only the graphical user interface, it also requires a Text Analysis Server called NLParrot to work. This used to be distributed via Dockerhub, but I don't want to manage that account any longer. So, currently I don't distribute NLParrot at all.

Configuration

You can run Balalingo by executing the file balalingo/balalingo from the downloaded package. When you first start Balalingo you should configure it. For this choose Options → Options in Balalingo. Some configuration options apply immediately, some require a restart (there is no clear distinction, yet), so please restart Balalingo.

Supported Languages

Balalingo supports the following languages:

• 🇭🇷 Croatian
• 🇬🇧 English
• 🇯🇵 Japanese
• 🇪🇸 Spanish

Dictionaries

The following dictionaries are supported:

• Pons (Croatian → German, English → German, Spanish → German) ^{API key required}
• Wadoku (Japanese → German)

Support for these dictionaries might come in the future:

• JMdict (Japanese → multiple languages)