Introduction to polyglot

Félix Luginbühl

2018-03-19

The polyglot package lets you use the R console as an interactive learning environment in order to memorize any dataset you want. Its main goal is to put foreign language vocabulary learning in the R workflow, so R can also be used to study languages or anything related to flashcards.

Install polyglot

To install and run polyglot, type the following in the R console:

install.packages("polyglot")
library(polyglot)
learn() # to launch the interactive learning environment

Before launching the interactive environment, be sure to have the appropriate locale settings.

Set the Appropriate Encoding

To learn French vocabulary for instance, type the following in the R console:

Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "French")      # for Windows
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "fr_FR")       # for macOS
Sys.setlocale("LC_TIME", "fr_FR.utf8")  # for Modern Linux etc.

If you have any problem with the encoding, or if you want to read a dataset with an non-Latin alphabet, please type ?Sys.setlocale() and follow the instructions.

Add your Own Datasets

If you want to open the directory containing the datasets to add your own dataset in an CSV format, type the following:

library(polyglot)
learnDir()

Go here to read a blog post describing the package with more development.

Happy learning!