Anki Deck for Tok Pisin

An Anki flash cards deck to learn Tok Pisin.

Tok Pisin is the primary language spoken in Papua New Guinea. This deck contains the vocabulary to get you started as a speaker of Tok Pisin. The deck contains around 1700 notes consisting of a Tok Pisin word, the English translation, and an example sentence to illustrate how the word is used.

This deck will get you a long way toward being a speaker of Tok Pisin, because the language is easy to learn. Tok Pisin started as a trade language derived from English. Its vocabulary is small: the 1700 words in this deck cover most words used in day-to-day conversations. The grammar is much easier to learn than English, too. For example, verbs do not change depending on the tense or the person. Once you learn a verb on a card, you can use it in any grammatical situation.

This deck is a collaborative work. Development happens on GitHub at Sjlver/anki-tok-pisin. You suggestions, improvements or ideas are most welcome!

How this deck was created

1. Obtain a list of words and their translation.

   This project scraped the dictionary at http://www.tok-pisin.com/ to obtain a basic list of words.

2. Form cards from these words.

   We tried to smartly group words with multiple translations. This is common in Tok Pisin. Our goal was to find a way for users to learn the multiple meanings of a word, without confusing users.

3. Prioritize cards.

   Learning is much easier if the frequently-used and important words are learned first. We used word frequency data and manual prioritization to create a good card order.

4. Augment cards with extra information.

   We try to make cards as informative and beautiful as possible. First, we obtain a corpus of Tok Pisin from freely available texts, using Google's CorpusCrawler. From this corpus, we select example sentences for our cards, rank them, and add the best example to the card.

   Second, we look up information on English words, to make our cards more canonical. For example, we would transform "drive" into "to drive" to make it clear to the user that we're looking for the verb, not the noun.

Inspiration

Natural Language Corpus Data: Beautiful Data
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