My Vietnamese Dictionary

A GUI application to dynamically learn Vietnamese vocab by creating a personalized dictionary for users. Outputs an Excel spreadsheet of reviewed words for the user to easily access. Built with Python using tkinter library.

Screenshots

Image of Main Screen	Image of Main Screen	Image of Review Screen

How to Use

1. With Python installed, download the file "VietApp.py" into a desired folder.

• Or doing by Git, in your local terminal

  git clone https://github.com/vinle0/Viet-App.git

• This will output a "Viet-App" folder containing the contents.

2. In the terminal, enter the following command.

   run VietApp.py

Features

The project incorporates several software concepts:

• Web Scraping
  • BeautifulSoup
• API Access
  • Bing Image Search Engine, freeDictionaryAPI

    Note: the initial solution to search an image used a Google Search API. However, there were limitations as discussed here

• Excel Manipulation
  • openpyxl
• Manipulating Operating Systems
  • os, subprocess

Main Features

Functions	Description
Random Word	1. Webscrapes from the 3000 most common words 2. Creates a local directory called Images and downloads an image into that directory. 3. Display the image and have the user guess the word. 4. User has the option to save the word to an Excel spreadsheet.
Review	1. System creates a local called Review directory and creates a Excel spreadsheet called Review.xlsx 2. Opens Review.xlsx and show the user the following attributes in the Notebook widget of tkinter: Picture: Accesses the Images directory and displays the image Word: Displays the English and Vietnamese Word English: Displays the English definition and example Viet: Displays the Vietnamese definition and example 3. Traverse through the array by arrows or by entering a word - If it is a new word, create a new entry and append to the Excel spreadsheet. - If it is a word already entered in the Excel, go to that entry.

Additionally, there are other features that are unique to translation

Supplemental Features

Functions	Description
Individual	Translates each word in the definition and example into individual Vietnamese words. Through Notepad, outputs the words as a Python tempfile.
Open Excel	Access the Review.xlsx to output words currently saved in Review directory. Through Notepad, outputs the words as a Python tempfile.
Hint	Access the freeDictionaryAPI to get the definition of a given word.

Limitations

There are several limitations/errors that would hinder the performance of the app.

• Initially used Google Images Search API to obtain higher quality images and stricter guidelines for images.
  • Utilized a personal API key in the Google Custom Search API library
  • Has the advantage of saving the Google Image to memory in a BytesIO object, which could have eliminated disk write/save to the Images directory entirely.
  • However, as a cloud-based API, the maximum number of searches per day is only 100 searches.
    • Bing Image Search Engine allows unlimited downloads on images as an async url.
• Some words may not have an explicit definition/example and will result in an error in the Review windows
  • E.g., scenery
• Loading Individual translations and entering a word in the Review window has a slow time performance.
• When accessing freeDictionaryAPI, there are no synonyms. Thus, guessing the word has to be exact.
• No functions to sort and delete entries in the Excel spreadsheet.
• All the words entered have to be in English; there is no checking in the Review windows if the entered word is correct.

Reflection

This personal project came as an inspiration to learn more about Vietnamese in incorporating vocabulary. The objectives included self-learning Python and be acquainted with new concepts by reading documentation.

Originally, I wanted to use the PyDictionary to get a random word and have the user guess the word, but more often than not, the words are random and are not common to the daily conversations. Thus, I began to look into web scraping for common words, learning HTML along the way.

Next is to find the GUI interface for the user, to which I learned from the documentation of the tkinter library and many of its geometry functions.

Accessing from the API of Bing Search Image Engine, I wanted to store images and access them from a locally created folder. Thus, I began to research more about command line interfaces (CLI) and the os and subprocess libraries.

One of the main challenges was to store all the learned and saved words. To this end, I implemented an accessible Excel spreadsheet through the openpyxl library which would iterate through the sheet and append accordingly. In other words, one could build their own personalized phrase book.

As a personal project, I hope to develop not only my Vietnamese skills but also to learn programming in Python and be introduced to many data engineering concepts like web scraping, APIs, and command lines.

Future Plans

Due to time constraints, there are still ways to go. In addition to resolving the limitations aforementioned above, I hope to expand my dictionary to become even more user-friendly and dynamic for the user. These include but not limited to

• Pronunciation (Audio Output)
• Writing
  • There is a canvas widget within the tkinter library which I can experiment further upon.
• Email
  • To give the user a summary of what they learned in the app.

Don't hesitate to reach out for further questions or suggestions.