[Tutor] language aid (various)

[Owain Clarke]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 5:43 AM, Owain Clarke <simbobo at cooptel.net> wrote:
>   
>> My question is, that if I proceed like this I will end up with a single list
>> of potentially several hundred strings of the form "frword:engword". In
>> terms of performance, is this a reasonable way to do it, or will the program
>> increasingly slow down?
>>     
> From: "Carnell, James E" <jecarnell at saintfrancis.com>
>   
>> A dictionary (associative array of keys and values) seems a good 
>> datatype to use. vocab = {} vocab[frenchword]?= englishword
>> ?
>>     
> .......
>   
>> Cheers!!
>> Albert-Jan
>>     
>
> Sure, a dict is the obvious choice. For saving into file, if the app is
> to be used internally, you can even print it in the form of a python
> dict (with the '{}', ':' & ',') so that reading the dict data is just
> importing:
>     import french_english
>
> Denis
>
> I 3rd the dictionary choice. They (for me at least) aren't as clean on
> the computer screen as arrays, but once you get good at it you can even
> have multiple definitions and weights for how relevant that word is. You
> (in the future when you get comfortable with dictionaries) can take it
> into networkx or something and draw pictures of it, and really start
> messing around with it (using subnetworks to try and get context
> information). Google has some tech talks on  youtube concerning Language
> Processing using networks etc if that kind of thing interests you.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Bad answer man
>   
What a helpful forum - much thanks to all who've commented.  Seems to be 
a bit of a consensus here about dictionaries.  Let me just restate my 
reluctance, using examples from Spanish.

esperar = to hope
esperar = to wait
tambien = too [i.e. also]
demasiado = too [i.e. excessive]

So there are repeats in both languages.  I would like to end up with a 
file which I can use to generate flash cards, either to or from English, 
and I suppose I want the flexibility to have 1 word with 1 definition.

Having said that, I obviously recognise the expertise of the group, so I 
will probably pursue this option.

Owain