Adding the Korean-English Learners’ Dictionary to Mochi
This is a guest post written by Max. Max joined three months ago to help make Mochi a better fit for studying Korean. This post introduces the work we did towards that goal so far.
Arguably one of the best applications for spaced repetition is the study of (foreign) languages. Even though Korean has gained a lot of popularity over the years, the lack of freely available dictionaries is still an issue and the ecosystem around tooling lags behind languages like Japanese, which were historically more popular. Corporations like Naver offer a wide range of English-Korean dictionaries embedded into their dictionary app, the built-in SRS leaves much to be desired — in the end, it is still just a dictionary. A fantastic alternative is the Korean-English Learners' Dictionary made available by the National Institute of Korean Language. Covering more than 50,000 terms, including grammatical constructions and idioms, it is one of the best resources out there for everyone interested in studying Korean.
I personally gained an interest in computer programming for the sole reason of trying to leverage this indispensable resource as much as possible in my own journey as a student of Korean. While I had this great dictionary available to me, making it work with the SRS of my choice back then proved to be frustratingly cumbersome. Dissatisfied with my attempts, I abandoned that endeavor altogether and with it any rigor in studying Korean. Having the dictionary separate from the SRS simply introduces too much friction: creating flashcards by hand becomes too tedious to keep up over time.
Fast forward to today, and I am happy to share that we embedded the dictionary directly into Mochi and so solved this exact issue! The integration builds upon the primitives of Mochi that you all know already, the templating system especially. Adding a Korean word to a card immediately prompts you to select a dictionary entry to save.
Embedding a dictionary directly into an SRS (as opposed to the well-established approach of embedding an SRS into a dictionary) presents lots of unique challenges, not least because Mochi is a general-purpose SRS that aims to help as many people as possible benefit from spaced repetition, irrespective of the subject they are studying. On top of that, Korean is a language that makes itself rather difficult to work with at times. To give an example, words may be written and pronounced the same but can mean entirely different things. The best way to present such homonyms when reviewing cards is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. While we haven't yet arrived at a conclusive answer to this question and others like it, we're confident that the integration is already usable as it is right now, and we want to enable every user of Mochi to use it for studying Korean as soon as possible.
For the initial launch, the main goal is to show what frictionless study of Korean can look like. We're still testing the feature ourselves and will iterate on it quite a bit in the coming weeks while eagerly waiting for your feedback. I myself certainly cannot wait to start studying Korean again, now that it is so easy to go from looking up a new word to reviewing it seconds later, all in one place.
