Gunther Bot

English is not my native language and like many others, I always seek a way to improve it. This is an endless process I’ve started to like not so long. There are lots of techniques, methods, tools, and applications that help you with that task.

One way I’m using to delve into English is to read books. Recently, I finished my favorite the Lord of the Rings trilogy. To me, its language is slightly outdated but nevertheless, I greatly increased my vocabulary. Reading these books I’ve noticed that some words I didn’t know looked familiar. I had a strong feeling that I’d already translated them before but the translation didn’t sit up firmly in my mind.

There are many great applications to creating cards to memorize words and repeating them. People have invested much in them in terms of time and research to help users improve their vocabularies in the best possible ways. Unlikely I’m able to make something more useful.

Anyway, I wanted to create something that fits my own requirements, something that I can change the way I prefer at any time. It is always great to polish your coding skills, isn’t it? That’s why I decided to create a simple translating application to count translations of each word forming my own online vocabulary. At the same time, I wanted it to ask me for translations from this vocabulary sometimes, applying the interval learning approach, just like in serious applications.

So, meet Gunther written in Python using the Python Telegram Bot library and Google Cloud Translation API. It is completely user-friendly for deploying as a Docker microservice. I’ve been using it for two years polishing some ugly stuff and now I’m completely happy with the final result.