fortune is a classic UNIX program that displays random fortunes, pithy quotes, and the like:

$ fortune
If you think last Tuesday was a drag, wait till you see what happens tomorrow!

Today, I repurposed fortune (really fortune-mod) as a language study tool by scraping some Korean idioms from Wikiquote from Wikiquote):

$ fortune korean
“쇠귀에 경 읽기.”
    아무리 좋은 말을 하면서 가르치려고 하여도 그 뜻을 제대로 헤아리지 못하는 사람을 두고 하는 말.

This one says “Chanting sutras into the ears of a cow,“ defined as “A phrase used when someone fails to understand what you are trying to teach them no matter how well you choose your words.”

I set fortune korean (with some gentle text styling) as my fish greeting, so I can learn a new idiom every time I open a terminal—see below.

A screenshot of a fish prompt preceded by the output of the `fish_greeting.fish` script. The idiom is “한 번 엎지른 물은 다시 주워 담지 못한다” and its explanation is 한 번 지나간 일은 다시 돌이켜 회복할 수 없다는 말.

You can find my database and fish_greeter.fish script on GitHub.