Toisto

Toisto is an app to practice languages that runs in the terminal. It is developed in Python and available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, and iOS (iPhone and iPad).

Toisto is Finnish and means reiteration, playback, repetition, reproduction.

Toisto is beta software at the moment. It comes with a limited set of words and phrases in Dutch, English, and Finnish.

[!NOTE] As long as Toisto is in beta the progress file format may change occasionally, causing your progress to be lost.

Example sessions

How to install Toisto

$ uv tool install toisto

$ uv tool upgrade toisto

$ uv tool install toisto

$ uv tool upgrade toisto

$ uv tool install toisto

$ uv tool upgrade toisto

$ pip upgrade toisto

How to use Toisto

How to practice

Start Toisto as follows, giving the language you want to practice (the target language) and your language (the source language) as arguments:

$ toisto practice --target fi --source en

To practice a specific concept and related concepts, pass it as follows (väri means color):

$ toisto practice --target fi --source en väri

It's also possible to specify more than one concept to practice (hedelmä means fruit and vihannes means vegetable):

$ toisto practice --target fi --source en hedelmä vihannes

Add --help or -h to get more information about the practice command, including the available concepts:

$ toisto practice --help

How to track progress

Use the progress command to see which quizzes you've answered correctly and when they will be presented next.

$ toisto progress

Add --help or -h to get more information about the progress command:

$ toisto progress --help

How to share progress between devices

If you use Toisto on multiple devices, you probably want to share progress bwtween devices. Toisto can take progress made on other devices into account if it has access to the progress made on the other devices. To give Toisto access to those progress files, we need to make sure Toisto saves its progress to one shared folder from all devices. For example, on a cloud drive. Use the configure command on each device where you use Toisto to set the save folder:

$ toisto configure --progress-folder /home/user/shared-drive/toisto  # Run this command on every device

See How to configure the folder where to save progress for more information on the configure --progress-folder command.

How to configure Toisto

How to configure your language

To prevent having to pass your target and source language as command-line arguments each time you run Toisto, you can save these to Toisto's configuration file:

$ toisto configure --target nl --source en

When running the previous command, Toisto creates a file .toisto.cfg in your home directory if it doesn't exist, adds the languages section if it doesn't exist, and adds or changes the target and source language:

[languages]
target = nl
source = en

How to configure extra concept files

To prevent having to pass extra concept files as command-line arguments each time you run Toisto, you can save these to Toisto's configuration file:

$ toisto configure --extra my_concepts1.json --extra my_concepts2.json

When running the previous command, Toisto creates a file .toisto.cfg in your home directory if it doesn't exist, adds the files section if it doesn't exist, and adds the files to the list:

[files]
/home/user/my_concepts1.json
/home/user/my_concepts2.json

In addition to adding individual files, it is also possible to add folders to read extra concept files from. Toisto searches for concept files from the specified folders recursively.

[!NOTE] See the software documentation on how to create extra concept files.

How to configure the folder where to save progress

By default, Toisto saves progress to your home folder. To save progress to a different folder, for example a cloud drive, configure the progress folder as follows:

$ toisto configure --progress-folder /home/user/toisto

When running the previous command, Toisto creates a file .toisto.cfg in your home directory if it doesn't exist, adds the progress section if it doesn't exist, and adds the folder:

[progress]
folder=/home/user/toisto

How to configure progress updates

To prevent having to pass the desired progress update frequency as command-line argument each time you run Toisto, you can save the progress update frequency to Toisto's configuration file:

$ toisto configure --progress-update 20

When running the previous command, Toisto creates a file .toisto.cfg in your home directory if it doesn't exist, adds the practice section if it doesn't exist, and adds the desired progress update frequency:

[practice]
progress_update = 20

How to configure a different mp3 player

On Windows, Linux, and MacOS, Toisto uses Google Translate's text-to-speech API to convert text to speech and then plays the resulting mp3 file using an mp3 player. On iOS, Toisto uses the say command to convert text to speech and an mp3 player is not used.

By default, Toisto uses afplay on MacOS, mpg123 on Linux, and a builtin library (Pygame) on Windows to play the mp3 files.

You can configure Toisto to use a different mp3 player:

$ toisto configure --mp3player name_of_mp3_player

When running the previous command, Toisto creates a file .toisto.cfg in your home directory if it doesn't exist, adds the commands section if it doesn't exist, and adds the mp3 player:

[commands]
mp3player = name_of_mp3_player or `builtin`

Make sure the mp3 player is on the PATH or include the complete filepath of the mp3 player.

How it works

Toisto quizzes you repeatably on words and phrases in the language you want to practice, your target language. For each quiz, Toisto keeps track of how long you answer it correctly. When you answer a quiz correctly multiple times, Toisto will silence the quiz for a while. The longer the time you have answered the quiz correctly, the longer a quiz is silenced. This starts at a few minutes, but then increases rapidly when you keep answering correctly.

Toisto supports quiz types such as:

• Translate a word or phrase from your target language to your source language or the other way around.

  For example, if your native language is English and you're practicing Dutch, Toisto can ask you to give the English version of "maandag" (which is, you guessed it, "Monday") or ask you to give the Dutch version of "Friday" (which is "vrijdag").

• Listen to a word or phrase from your target language and type what you hear either in your target language or your source language.

  For example, if your target language is Finnish, Toisto may say "Tänään on maanantai" and then you have to type ether "Tänään on maanantai" or "Today is Monday".

• Give a singular version of a plural, or a plural version of a singular.

  For example, what is the plural of "talo" (meaning house in Finnish, and the answer is "talot") or what is the singular of "de huizen" (meaning the houses in Dutch, and the answer would be "het huis").

• Give the diminutive form of a word.

  For example, what is the diminutive form of "het huis" in Dutch (meaning house in Dutch and the answer would be "het huisje").

• Change the grammatical person from and to first person, second person, and third person.

  For example, when asked what the second person of "ik eet" (meaning "I eat") is, the correct answer would be "jij eet" ("you eat").

• Change the tense of verbs from present to past tense or the other way around.

  For example, what is the past tense of "she walks" or what is the present tense version of "he painted".

• Change the comparative degree of an adjective.

  For example, what is the superlative degree of "aardig" (which means "nice", and the answer would be "aardigst").

• Give the antonym of adjectives.

  For example, what is the antonym of "good"? The answer is of course "bad".

• Change the grammatical mood of sentences. Toisto currently supports declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences.

  For example, what is the interrogative form of "The car is black"? The answer would be "Is the car black?".

• Answer a question.

  For example, a question in Finnish could be "Pidätko sinä jäätelöstä?" (meaning "Do you like ice cream?") and correct answers would be "Pidän" (meaning "Yes, I do") and "En" (meaning "No, I don't").

See the complete list of quiz types.

When you stop the program (hit Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D), progress is saved in a file named .toisto-{uuid}-progress-{target language}.json in your home folder, for example .toisto-221b69f2-83ef-11ef-abc8-2642a2aed6c5-progress-fi.json.

Further documentation

• More information on why Toisto exists and what the future plans are.
• The Toisto software documentation describes the inner workings of Toisto, including the format of the concept files.
• The Toisto developer documentation provides information on how to develop, test, and release Toisto. This is aimed at people who (want to help) develop Toisto.