toisto 0.40.2

Toisto is a command-line terminal app to practice languages.

Toisto

Toisto is an app to practice languages that runs in the terminal. It is developed in Python and available for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and iPadOS.

It uses spaced repetition to help you memorize vocabulary and phrases. It comes with a limited set of words and phrases in Dutch, English, and Finnish.

Toisto is Finnish and means reiteration, playback, repetition, reproduction.

[!WARNING] Toisto is currently in beta. The progress file format may change occasionally, causing your progress to be lost.

See it in action

Here's what a typical practice session looks like:

Installation

Prerequisites

On Linux, Windows, and macOS, install uv:

$ curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

With uv you can install tools developed in Python, such as Toisto. Advantage of uv is that it also installs Python, if needed.

On Linux, you must have an mp3 player installed so Toisto can speak. By default, Toisto expects mpg123 to be available. If you want to use a different mp3 player, you can configure Toisto to do so, see configure a different mp3 player below.

On macOS, Toisto works best in a more modern terminal than the default macOS terminal. We test with iTerm2. Toisto should work mostly fine with the default macOS terminal app though, so installing iTerm2 or another terminal is optional.

On iOS and iPadOS, install the free a-Shell app. a-Shell provides a Unix-like terminal for Toisto to run in. It has Python and pip (Python package manager) pre-installed.

Install Toisto

On Linux, Windows, and macOS:

$ uv tool install toisto

On iOS and iPadOS:

$ pip install toisto

Quick start

To practice:

$ toisto practice --target fi --source en

Supported languages at the moment are English (en), Finnish (fi), and Dutch (nl).

To stop practicing: type Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D.

To prevent having to specify your target and source language every practice session, configure them as follows:

$ toisto configure --target fi --source en

Further documentation

• User guide.
• Background information on why Toisto exists and what the future plans are.
• Concept files describes the format of the concept files.
• Software documentation describes how Toisto works.
• Developer documentation provides information on how to develop, test, and release Toisto. This is aimed at people who (want to help) develop Toisto.