I’ve been learning German for quite some time now. Some months ago, it came to the point where I was stuck – in order to progress I had to learn the German cases by heart.
It’s not a lot of data, and being able to understand it is relatively straightforward, however knowing it actively as part of a language takes practice.
My main sources of German practice are Duolingo, books and music. Both books and music contribute to passive knowledge rather than practice, and Duolingo just wasn’t focused enough. I decided to write something myself. It was a small itch I had to scratch!
Ideally, I just wanted exercises that given a sentence, I would have to pick the correct form of der/das/die/den/dem/des whenever it appeared. This should apply to ein/eine/eines/einer/einem/einen, dein/deine/… and mein/meine/… etc. you get the point.
To achieve that, I wrote a small chrome extension that would process a page, find all the pieces of texts to replace, and add a bit of dropdown html instead of them. Then you would pick the right option in the dropdown – it would turn into the right word with a green checkmark, otherwise you would get some toaster message saying you were wrong.
Since these days I have a full time job plus two kids – I wrote this mostly during train rides and a couple of evenings. Doing this allowed me to lean how to write a chrome extension (it’s really easy), but interestingly enough, there is a small challenge there I didn’t expect: how to regex-search through text nodes in a given HTML document and to replace the match with some HTML? The solution is apparently non-trivial.
If you decide to take the old text, add some tags and then old_tag.innerHTML = modify(text_data) you are in for a nasty surprise. If that text_data contained html tags as text – they would now be parsed as HTML. This is at best a bug, and at worst a security risk. It would appear to work, except when it won’t. Unfortunately, a lot of answers on stackoverflow suggest you do exactly that.
Well, as a lazy developer – I used somebody else’s answer, almost as is. It wasn’t even the selected answer – the selected answer used innerHTML :(
Here is the extension itself, you are welcome to try it out, e.g. on Rotkäppchen (AKA “Little Red Riding Hood”).
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