conjugation situation

4 minute read

Deep pools of being online

I dived back into web dev yesterday, and that html water feels good. I'm working on what will hopefully be a smallish project - a conjugation table creator for portuguese practice. The MVP is

• Lets you enter verbs as a comma separated string and returns the conjugation table (json)
• Displays these verbs as a table you can print (with selected grammatical persons and tenses)
• Exports this table as a flashcard csv for Anki

I'm using Next.js and vercel because I've been meaning to

• make something in react
• use more typescript
• understand serverless functions
• use a flashy product

About midway into the work yesterday I realised my data model wasn't sufficient. I'd just been looping through the diffent tables available on conjugacao.br.com and returning it all as arrays, but after looking through the wiktionary page for cantar and seeing their lovely conjugation table [fig-1] I realised that verb conjugations are well understood, and named properties are more appropriate.

As I'm using typescript I've made an interface to describe a verb

export interface Verbo {
    formasImpessoais: {
        infinitivo: string,
        gerúndio: string,
        particípio: string
    },
    formasPessoais: {
        modoIndicativo: {
            presente: Tempo,
            pretéritoImperfeito: Tempo,
            pretéritoPerfeito: Tempo,
            pretéritoMaisQuePerfeito: Tempo,
            futuroDoPresente: Tempo,
            futuroDoPretérito: Tempo,
        },
        modoSubjuntivo: {
            presente: Tempo,
            pretéritoImperfeito: Tempo,
            futuro: Tempo
        }
        modoImperativo: {
            afirmativo: Tempo,
            negativo: Tempo
        }
        infinitivo: Tempo
    }
}

interface Tempo {
    singular: {
        primeira?: string,
        segunda: string,
        terceira: string
    },
    plural: {
        primeira: string,
        segunda: string,
        terceira: string
    }
}

Now I need to update the scraper to fill out the object correctly - the work never ends. The biggest challenge will be not getting stuck on small things - I need to remember the big picture.

Other

I had a lovely time sitting in the sun reading, life affirming.

I went to see a performance work at the student gallery in VCA. It was 5 femmes, each doing a series of actions including: tossing a shawl over a metal pole, throwing clay at a wall, dancing, moaning, lighting candles, ringing bells. I enjoyed it. Benjamin, who is (used to be?) a dancer, mentioned how nice it is to see a language they both understand and enjoy. I realise it is not a language I understand, but it is a language I enjoy.

Didn't do anything of my bullet journal, got too tied up in coding and art. It's good to know myself.

I keep forgetting to make a cowboy comic

Oh no! Definitely needs some time put aside each week to gather up a range of ideas. Maybe a timer? Eveyr 2 hours - how could this be a cowboy comic? idk.

listening to

• Agosto by bad bunny

questions

• why am I so tired each morning?
• Is the primacy of spoken language presuming more communication than it actually provides?
• How could this be a cowboy comic?

what else

I can't remember if I already said, I've removed the tags from the entrys - I don't think I'm actually going to use them, and as for now this journal is only for me and maybe Giles, so I can't see an audience needing to search by topic in any way where a keyword search wouldn't suffice.

I want to try to put images in with fig references, then insert them to the right of the post or as a lightbox, so that's what I'm trying to do with this image down here.

fig 1: