Help

Overview

Ru-pad is a collection of tools to help you learn Russian. You can spend a large amount of time finding new vocabulary and grammar and then trying to learn it and ru-pad helps to find, organize and manage it as you go. It’s core job is language translation and it tries to be smart about this. To do this is uses multiple translation services to try and find the result that gives the best information. These are the ones in order of preference it currently uses (although more maybe added) :-

Open Russian database
Yandex dictionary
Google translate

The best results come from the Open Russian database. These commonly have full declension information for words and you can look up using any of those declensions. It also has a reasonable selection of examples and other information. This database is being constantly updated so will improve over time. As a last resort it just uses Google translate which is good for phrases but can give some dubious results. In many cases when searching for individual words it will collate information from multiple sources to give the most useful information it can.

Ru-pad also integrates into the excellent Anki to help actually learn all the new information. Quoting from Anki’s website

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it’s a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

If you are learning Russian and not using it (or something similar) I highly recommend you check it out. See the Anki section for more info.

Phrasebooks

Phrasebooks are where you collect related lists of words and phrases. These commonly include :-

Specific word lists, i.e. types of trees
Vocabulary for a book as you come across it reading
Specific grammar examples and rules

You can create a new phrasebook on the phrasebook panel. If you do not give it a name it will create one based on the current date. Adding a phrase to the phrasebook is simple, you can do this by :-

Type directly in the phrasebook panel. It will translate it and add the first definition it finds.
Everywhere you see a :star: you can click it to add to the currently selected phrasebook, it will toggle to a :star-fill[gold]: if it is in the current phrasebook.

Sessions

A session stores history and other state so you can remember where you were when switching between different learning activities. A good use it to have a session per book you are reading or your current homework so when you get back to it you can see the history and translations you were last using. To switch, create or delete a session you click on the session dropdown at the bottom right of the screen (this will initially show default as the session).

Anki

Anki is recommended to help learn words, phrases and rules you have collected in ru-pad. It will minimise the time you spend learning by using a spaced repetition algorithm to avoid spending time on words you have already learnt. To export you can :-

Within the phrasebook window select Export->Anki from the bottom bar
Within the verb windows select Export->Anki from the bottom bar

This will export all the relevant words / conjugations with audio and organise it by verb / phrasebooks within the Anki deck. By default it will place all exports from ru-pad within the ru-pad deck.

Setting it up

Ru-pad supports exporting Phrasebooks and verbs to Anki but requires a little configuration of Anki to do it.

First you need to install Anki on your desktop machines. Browse to Anki and scroll to the bottom to install the latest version.
Start Anki desktop.
Select Main Menu -> Tools -> Add-ons from the main menu.
Press Get Add-ons... button
Enter code 2055492159 (This is the AnkiConnect plugin)
Restart Anki
Select Main Menu -> Tools -> Add-ons from the main menu.
Select the AnkiConnect addon from the list
Press the Config button
Replace the contents with

{
    "apiKey": null,
    "apiLogPath": null,
    "ignoreOriginList": [],
    "webBindAddress": "127.0.0.1",
    "webBindPort": 8765,
    "webCorsOriginList": ["*"]
}

User Interface

The screen is broken up into a number of windows depending on the layout (see changing-layout). Each window can be set to one of a number of tools by clicking the :list: icon at it’s top left. You can the choose from the available tools: -

Dictionary
- Will find the most detailed information it can on the entered word or phrase.
Verb conjugator
- Easy to user verb conjugator incorporating aspect partners to make it simpler to get the right aspect when you need it.
Simple Translate
- Single line translations which will automatically pick the highest ranked entry.
Phrasebooks
- Lists of vocabulary you can create to help manage the volume of information. These integrate into Anki so help retain the information.
Declension tables
- Noun and adjective declensions and pronouns for all cases.
History
- History of all search words, verbs and phrases linked to where they came from. Select to see the original source.

Settings can be accessed by pressing the :gear: button at the top right of screen at any time.

Common elements

Some icons you will see throughout the interface and do the same thing. These are :-

:star: - Add the entry to the current phrasebook. Click to add it.
:star[gold]: - Entry is in the current phrasebook. Click to remove it.
:list: - Change the tool a window is showing
:play-circle: - Play the audio for the entry
:files: - Copy the russian to the clipboard
:trash-fill: - Delete an entry for a list
:question-circle: - Help information.
:gear: - Settings. '

Preferences

The preferences are edited by pressing the :gear: icon at the top right of the window.

Layout

To change to a preset window layout for the application, press :gear: -> Layout and choose from the dropdown. You can split windows and close them via the :list: icon at the top left of any window. Then choose from :-

Split vertically - Split into two windows stacked on top of each other
Split horizontally - Split into two windows side by side.
Close - Close the window

Cloud

Create and sign in to a user account to remember your history and save phrasebooks. All you searches and changes will be replicated to all other open Ru-pad windows allowing to managed your data on any of your devices.

Click Sign Up to create a new account. Your email address and a password or 6 characters or more is required.

Click Sign In to sign in to an existing user account.

App settings

Colorize parts of speech everywhere

With use part of speech highlighting in all tools not just the dictionary.

Show stress marks

Will display stress marks on russian words where possible.

Play audio on select

Will the play the russian audio when the word is clicked

Clear history

Clear all history from your dictionary.

Warning This deletes your history in the cloud

Clear caches

This will clear local search caches. Only use if you suspect having stale data.

Anki settings

Select the pronouns to export when exporting verbs.

Only create russian cards

This will only show the card with russian on the front. This halves your review load and shows you just what you need, the russian.

This actually creates both cards and suspends the other card in Anki, so if you really want to enable it later you can do in Anki.

Add pronouns

Add pronouns before each conjugation and use audio including the pronoun.

Prefer real voice

Try and find audio using a real person, if it can’t be found it will fall back to using text to speech.

Fallback to unprefixed

If Prefer real voice and Add pronouns are selected and it cannot find audio with the the pronoun appended it will try and find real speech for the conjugation without the pronoun. If it still can’t be found then text to speech will be used.

Show stress

Use the stressed version of the Russian text if it is available.

Duplicate scope

This allows you to avoid adding duplicate cards that may exist in different phrasebooks. Generally adding duplicates is a bad idea as it just increases your review workload for words that you are already learning so by default it will not add cards that are already present in any phrasebook. The options to control this are

Deck - Only check for duplicates within a single phrasebook
All ru-pad decks - Check for duplicates in any deck under the main ru-pad deck. i.e. do not add duplicates that exist in any phrasebook that has already been exported to Anki. This is the default.
All Anki - Check for duplicates in all decks Anki.

Acknowledgements

A big shout out to the following whose work has made creating this app a whole lot easier and better

Open Russian Dictionary for their excellent work compiling an open source Russian dictionary
Forvo for their epic collection of natives speakers enunciating words and phrases.
Shoelace for outstanding UI elements
Rollup for making packaging not a nightmare
Lit Element for their fast and clean reusable lightweight web component framework
Flag Icons for all the countries flags in SVG

About

This is developed with :heart-fill[red]: by Martin Slater.

Please reach out with bugs and features that would help you on your path to Russian language proficiency,

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