Nepali Dictionary (someday)

The story

A long time ago (around 2003, I think), I decided to work on learning Nepali. The common method for this is to use existing tools to quiz yourself to learn vocabulary. Unfortunately, the existing tools I could find were not so great (in particular, in handling the Unicode characters necessary). I therefore decided to take the geek route; making a website to learn Nepali gave me a nice opportunity to also better learn PHP. It also let me sort of take ownership on the learning, which I have long since found helps me stay engaged.

The website did a lot of things, like automatically generating verb conjugations and giving quizzes, that kind of thing. Since I just put it up as a website on my page at the Department of Mathematics at OSU, it was also accessible to anyone. This was great, as it gave others a chance to take advantage of the work I had done. In fact, at one point my page was third when doing a Google search for “Nepali dictionary”. It was also less than great, because, like I had said, I was using it as a reason to learn PHP better, and it was far from optimal.

On every page view, my code simply loaded a flat file with all the words and then processed it to do whatever was necessary. Remember, this was before Gmail had helped to demonstrate that JavaScript could do things other than scroll text at the bottom of the window. In any case, this was a highly inefficient idea.

The next step

After I received my Master’s in mathematics and started work in computer science, I decided that I should reimplement it better (this is somewhat coupled with the fact that PHP scripts are disallowed on websites here. I do have a lot of good ideas how to do it. I have since gained a bit of experience with JavaScript, Jquery, AJAX design, and local storage provided in browsers with some of the current HTML5 proposal. So don’t count this out completely.