Substantiv is a utility that creates and plays utterances of German nouns learned on Duolingo. Its name comes from the German word for noun.
One of the hardest facets of German for English speakers to learn is the genders of nouns; unlike the nouns of other gendered languages, such as the Romance languages, one cannot determine the gender of a German noun from its orthography. Instead, the genders of nouns, for the most part, have to be memorized.
Substantiv takes the German nouns that a Duolingo user has learned, generates phrases of the form [definite article] [noun], and continually plays these phrases.
Since the gender of a noun can (usually) be inferred from its definite article, these phrases can help a listener remember the genders of nouns. This tool can also serve as a resource for improving listening and pronunciation skills.
To install and run Substantiv, make sure that you have pip and sox (with an mp3 handler) installed on your machine.
To install Substantiv, first run
$ python setup.py
Then, create a username.txt file in the base directory which contains your Duolingo username. This can be done by running
$ echo "[Duolingo username]" > username.txt
Finally, create a password.txt file in the base directory which contains your Duolingo password. This can be done by running
$ echo "[Duolingo password]" > password.txt
All of the above commands only need to be run once.
To run Substantiv, invoke the following command
$ python substantiv.py [number of utterances]
The optional [number of utterances] argument is number of utterances that the system will play. It defaults to 1000.