LinguasorbRich Newbie United Kingdom linguasorb.com Joined 5430 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 1 of 16 14 January 2010 at 5:44pm | IP Logged |
Hi Everyone,
My name's Rich, this is my first post - I hope this isnt dismissed as spam because I think this could be very useful to all language learners.
I have built a language learning tool that I welcome you all to try - it is in its early stages so im just telling a couple of forums at the moment to get some feedback and see how you useful you guys think it is/could be. I am open to genuine feedback, if its rubbish tell me, if its good tell me! It is completely free, and will stay that way - so im not trying to get money out of you!
The basic idea is that you enter a list of words you want to learn (or revise), and then whenever you come across these words on a web page they will be displayed in Spanish (or whatever language you are learning) instead of the English. It requires a toolbar plug-in for IE or Firefox.
This means that you read the words in context as you browse the web - hopefully reinforcing the words throughout the day as you go about your normal business online.
This is just a tool to help learn vocab, it will not translate full sentences or teach grammar.
The website is http://www.linguasorb.com - as I say its totally free, its just meant as something that might be useful to language learners.
It would be great to hear what people think, how they use it, how it is useful (if at all), how it could be more useful etc.
Thanks
Rich
Edited by LinguasorbRich on 14 January 2010 at 5:44pm
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administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7378 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 16 14 January 2010 at 6:11pm | IP Logged |
Rich, normally we do not allow such URL drops but in your case I will allow it. A very interesting concept it is. How do you deal with flexion (words that change through conjugation, declension, etc...)?
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Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5813 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical)
| Message 3 of 16 14 January 2010 at 6:35pm | IP Logged |
That's a pretty neat concept, I'll certainly give it a try and tell you what I think. Thank you for working on it and making it available to us! My first suggestion would be to allow words to be added faster, if that's at all possible. It's going to take me a while to get in enough to actually test it out. How did you do this, by the way? It's pretty incredible.
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Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 4 of 16 14 January 2010 at 7:09pm | IP Logged |
This is a very interesting concept! I like it a lot.
The problem I can foresee is when you start having a lot of words in there and all web pages start to look like bad
machine translations.
EDIT: Unfortunately it's only availible for IE and Firefox. Completely understandable, but I'll probably not switch
from Safari just for this.
Edited by Ari on 14 January 2010 at 7:13pm
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LinguasorbRich Newbie United Kingdom linguasorb.com Joined 5430 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 5 of 16 14 January 2010 at 10:41pm | IP Logged |
administrator wrote:
Rich, normally we do not allow such URL drops but in your case I will allow it. A very interesting concept it is. How do you deal with flexion (words that change through conjugation, declension, etc...)? |
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Great thanks :)
At the moment it is a straight forward word for word replace, I have been thinking about this though. For verbs im playing with the idea of having a feature where if you add an infinitive it will automatically translate the conjugations too. This would have to be limited to the x number of most common verbs, and for limited languages because it would be some serious data entry to set up!
Unfortunately, with English in particular there are always going to be cases where you cant deduce the meaning from the spelling alone and so may get the wrong translation. This may just have to be a limitation users are made aware of - but im hoping users will be able to give feedback on things like this.
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LinguasorbRich Newbie United Kingdom linguasorb.com Joined 5430 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 6 of 16 14 January 2010 at 10:49pm | IP Logged |
Woodpecker wrote:
That's a pretty neat concept, I'll certainly give it a try and tell you what I think. Thank you for working on it and making it available to us! My first suggestion would be to allow words to be added faster, if that's at all possible. It's going to take me a while to get in enough to actually test it out. How did you do this, by the way? It's pretty incredible. |
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I would like to add a bulk add feature so you can paste in a list of words form another source. If this is something people feel would be helpful it'll definitely get added.
I was also thinking of adding set list 'packs' (colours, food, numbers etc) that would add a bunch of related words in one click.
It will be interesting to find out just how many words works best. too many and pages could become difficult to read, which might put people of using it. Its all very experimental at the moment. I guess people will use it in different ways.
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LinguasorbRich Newbie United Kingdom linguasorb.com Joined 5430 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 7 of 16 14 January 2010 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
Ari wrote:
This is a very interesting concept! I like it a lot.
The problem I can foresee is when you start having a lot of words in there and all web pages start to look like bad
machine translations.
EDIT: Unfortunately it's only availible for IE and Firefox. Completely understandable, but I'll probably not switch
from Safari just for this. |
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Shame you cant use it Ari - sorry about that!
You are right, because it doesnt translate sentences it only works with words in isolation, if you get to the point where most of a sentence is translated you could reinforce in correct word order.
I think its ok as long as people know what it is and what its not - after some trial and error I hope to have some guidlines on the best way of using it, the best number of words etc.
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cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6127 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish
| Message 8 of 16 15 January 2010 at 12:24am | IP Logged |
If I enter
The Word/Das Wort
Will it replace the article also? For gender, it might be useful just to see the gender with the noun anyway, even if there's no 'the' in the original sentence so we get the gender all the time.
"I don't understand that (das) wort."
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