This article explains how to create and work on courses. The explained concepts follow the course life cycle and we refer to technical terms from that description. For creating courses or working at existing ones Artikulate must be configured to work on a course repository. If that is done, you can open Artikulate and use the internal course editor as explained in the following.
There are two possible ways how to create courses:
When creating a course from a skeleton, usually one wants to maintain a course prototype (=skeleton) that than is used to provide courses for different languages.
Currently, the Artikulate team uses a special course skeleton (called "basic course skeleton") to coordinate creation of basic language courses. The basic course skeleton contains units prototypes and phrases for the topics
The goal is to cover basic vocabulary from different areas that are important when learning a new language.
In order to create a new language course, open the course editor (the top-left tool button). Then we have to perform the following steps:
After this you should see the course with the phrases in English as they are in skeleton. Save your changes by pressing OK button at the top of the screen. You can see that now all the phrases are in English and they are tagged as "unknown". This means that they still need to be translated into appropriate language.
Once you have created a new language course and updated it with course skeleton you can start translating your phrases.
You can now proceed with editing other phrases. Remember to save all changes to the course by pressing the "OK" button at the top menu bar.
To add the recordings you need to follow the same instructions as for translations. Therefore open Artikulate and go to the dialog "Course editor" (top-left button) and the choose “Edit courses” option. Choose a language for which you would like to do recordings for and the appropriate course. You can record the phrases that are already translated (they should be in blue color). In order to record a phrase expand it by clicking on the icon on its right. You should be able to see “Create New Recording” section. In order to record the phrase press the record button next to it, say the phrase, and then press the record button again to finish the recording. Now you can listen to what you have recorded by pressing the play button. If you like the recording choose “Replace existing recording” option or otherwise record yourself again. When you done with the phrase, change its status to “Completed” (meaning the phrase is now both translated and recorded) and close the phrase by clicking the tick button next to it. You can now do more recordings but you will need to save your changes before exiting the program. You can do it choosing the OK button on the top of the screen.
TODO / MISSING
Artikulate uses language specifications (called "phonology") that define lists of available phonemes for a language. In short, a phoneme is a natural sound of a language. (For a detailed explanation see e.g. .) We need such a phonology for every language to be able to tag phrases by the sounds that are specific to this language. Using phoneme tags for phrases enables users to select specific phonemes that they want to improve and hence allows a more focused training.
The already available languages can be found in the subdirectory data/languages.
For creating a phonology, the following steps are needed: