Terve kaikki, Andrew Quinn here, niche Finnish language learning Internet software builder. I’ve done the whole 20,000 sentence Finnish corpus several times over by now, so hopefully that adds some credence to my request.
I’d like to either implement, or see implemented, a character based mask for Finnish language input. I have an interactive JavaScript example already up of a good one, which is only slightly different from the one I used years ago for my Finnish flashcard decks.
I think this would be especially helpful for text input in particular, becuase Finnish frequently applies clitics like -kin, -hän, and -pä to words in ways which are often both (a) not guessable from the English translated context alone, and (b) not clearly signposted that you have typed a semantically correct but insufficiently long word, because the right answer has one or more of these suffixes.
One way this could be easily and cheaply implemented would be to simply overload the before-answer “Hint” field. Two examples:
This hint tells us we are looking for a word with 1 consonant, then either an E or an I, then 2 more consonants, then an A, O or U, then 1 more consonant, then a final I or E. I have found this gives an excellent feel for the “shape” of the word without trivializing the challenge.
Here’s a different example, using an alphanumeric psuedocipher instead of a punctuation-based one:
This could be either something users can choose to append to whatever their current Hint is, at runtime, or to just apply to all empty Hint blocks en masse as a one-time database mutation, or it could be a separate Hint block entirely. I’m not sure what would be the lowest-effort approach for you guys, take your pick from the smorgasbord.
I looked into writing a Tampermonkey script to prototype this functionality, but alas, I couldn’t find the true answer of the word does embedded into the source code of the page, you actually do need to answer it first before it gets retrieved from the backend. So unfortunately I don’t have anything I can contribute back to your excellent product, besides a lucid explanation of the request.
(Great work! This is one of the best language learning apps on the Internet IMO.)