lwtproject Pentaglot Senior Member Netherlands https://learning-wit Joined 4890 days ago 149 posts - 264 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, German, English, Mandarin Studies: Italian
| Message 1 of 355 04 July 2011 at 10:00am | IP Logged |
Some time ago, I created for my personal learning (i.e. reading & listening foreign texts, saving &
reviewing
vocab) a software package named "Learning with Texts (LWT)". The tool was inspired by Stephen
Krashen's
principles in Second Language Acquisition, Steve Kaufmann's LingQ system and ideas from
Khatzumoto,
published at "AJATT - All Japanese All The Time".
I uploaded the software now to Sourceforge and documented it. The software is 100 % free, open
source, and
in the public domain. You may do with it what you like: improve it, change it, publish an improved
version, etc.
To run LWT, you need a good web browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) and a local web server (Apache)
with PHP
and mySQL. An easy way to install a local web server are preconfigured packages like XAMPP (Win, Mac,
Linux)
or MAMP (Mac).
Read more about it: http://lwt.sourceforge.net/
I hope you'll enjoy it.
Edited by lwtproject on 10 July 2011 at 6:59pm
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rjtrudel Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6825 days ago 36 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish
| Message 2 of 355 04 July 2011 at 7:22pm | IP Logged |
Just made i clickable 4 u!
http://lwt.sourceforge.net/
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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5864 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 3 of 355 04 July 2011 at 10:22pm | IP Logged |
lwtproject wrote:
To run LWT, you need a good web browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) and a local web server (Apache) with PHP and mySQL. ...
I hope you'll enjoy it. |
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I am enjoying it. Thank you very much. I am very intrigued about how useful it can be. One of the things I like is an easy way to see how much of any given text (words) I know and don't know. As I try it out some more, I'll provide some further comments.
Suggestion: The installation is a bit more than a lot of users will be familiar with. Not quite for the faint-hearted. It does work as you describe but I think a number of potential users would find the installation and initial use a bit challenging. What I would suggest is that you find one or more "ordinary" computer users and, while you watch, have them install and use your software. That will show you what you might want to add to the install and help files.
Thanks again. I'm sure it was a lot of work.
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lwtproject Pentaglot Senior Member Netherlands https://learning-wit Joined 4890 days ago 149 posts - 264 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, German, English, Mandarin Studies: Italian
| Message 4 of 355 08 July 2011 at 10:46pm | IP Logged |
Version 0.6 of "Learning with Texts (LWT)" is available now.
I have also created and uploaded a screencast (5 min. long) that shows some of the features of LWT using simple
Chinese texts as examples: http://lwt.sourceforge.net/#screencasts
The installation is not very easy, but in my opinion not so complicated that an average user will not tackle it.
I will do a more detailed description of the installation process in the near future, maybe as a screencast.
Edited by lwtproject on 08 July 2011 at 10:47pm
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5318 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 5 of 355 09 July 2011 at 1:01am | IP Logged |
This may be a stupid question, but I watched your screencast and I still haven't figured what your program does and in what way it's different from other language learning programs.
I saw that you can look up words, but there are lots of other plugins that offer this functionality. For example, Globefish and Moji and many others.
How about a short feature list?
Edited by Doitsujin on 09 July 2011 at 7:06am
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tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5864 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
| Message 6 of 355 09 July 2011 at 9:02pm | IP Logged |
Doitsujin wrote:
How about a short feature list? |
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I have been trying out LWT. My comments so far are:
1. It seems to be well designed and well implemented.
2. It is relatively complicated for casual computer users in that it uses a server running on your computer, as well as the application. The install process will challenge some users. I have suggested a more-easily-understood set of instructions.
3. I like how you can set your knowledge of each word on a scale of 1-5, which shows up as different colours right in the text.
4. Entering text, audio and the translation of words is very easy.
5. The integrated audio player works very well.
6. It handles multiple languages very well.
7. I think it is well worth trying. I'm intrigued with its functionality and trying to figure out just how to use it most effectively. I think it has good possibilities.
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lwtproject Pentaglot Senior Member Netherlands https://learning-wit Joined 4890 days ago 149 posts - 264 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, German, English, Mandarin Studies: Italian
| Message 7 of 355 09 July 2011 at 10:40pm | IP Logged |
Doitsujin wrote:
This may be a stupid question, but I watched your screencast and I still haven't figured what
your program does and in what way it's different from other language learning programs. I saw that you can look up
words, but there are lots of other plugins that offer this functionality. [...] How about a short feature list? |
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Hi Doitsujin: the feature list and many screenshots are available here: http://lwt.sourceforge.net/
The latest version is now 0.7 (released today - minor improvements, more documentation, Japanese example
added).
@tommus: Thank you for trying LWT and posting your comments. If there are any problems, please post them here
or in the Sourceforge project help forum: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lwt/support - thanks!
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Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5015 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch
| Message 8 of 355 09 July 2011 at 11:45pm | IP Logged |
You should advertise on lingq.com.
For selecting expression it would be great to have a + to add word by word and this way selecting expressions with more than 6 words.
Also a minus sign would allow to select expressions separated like some German or dutch verbs. Clicking the minus would eliminate one by one the words between the 2 parts.
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