Building My Hindi Learning Buddy...
What Inspired Me...
When I started learning hindi, I wanted to practice more hindi words, letters, sentences to increase my hindi fluency and used to search for hindi quizzes, flashcards on the internet. This wasn't that fun and it slowed my progress. So I thought maybe other people might be going through the same problem, so why don't I make a program that can fix all of this, and then I ended up making Hindi Buddy.
How I built it...
I started with a simple Python script that:
- Greeted the user and asked for their name in a loop until valid input was received.
- Stored a vocabulary of Hindi letters, words, and common phrases mapped to English translations.
- Randomly selected five items for a short quiz.
- Compared the user’s answer against the correct translation using a cleaning function to handle variations.
- Tracked the score and ended with encouraging feedback.
Challenges I ran into...
- Inconsistent answers: People write “No problem,” “It’s okay,” “okay,” or “ok.” Handling multiple valid responses without making the matching logic too loose required careful cleaning and option-splitting.
- Demo timing: Creating a paced, readable demo that still felt natural took several iterations of sleep timers and pre-chosen answers.
- Code clarity vs. features: It was tempting to keep adding more words or fancy features, but I intentionally kept the first version focused so it would be easy to understand and demo.
- Emoji Colors: It was hard for me to add emojis at first because the thumbs up and down would give a thumbs up or down it would show the thumbs up but at the same time it would give anther emoji of the color used so I had to use the original one👍instead of👍🏽.
What I learned...
- Clear feedback (“Correct!👍” vs “Wrong!👎”), progress tracking, and encouraging messages at the end made the program feel more human.
- The power of randomization. Using
random.sample()kept each practice session fresh instead of repetitive. - Having patience for getting the correct or better answers.
- Do not be stuck to only one idea keep thinking and brainstorming for better ideas!!!
What's next for Hindi buddy...
Next for Hindi buddy is an app called "Hindi Buddy"(obviously) for students learning hindi. It will include flash cards, games, puzzles, quizzes and much more for hindi learners to explore!:)
