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Intensive reading website/app wishlist | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5560 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 13 26 March 2012 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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[Note to the moderators: I'm not sure where to put posts about intensive reading tools.
Please feel free to move this post to another section.] Are you sometimes frustrated by LingQ? Do you wish you could install Learning with Texts in 2 minutes and use it from your phone? Are you trying to read a huge amount of L2 text? If so, I'd love to pick your brain. Why? Maybe Steve Kaufmann will enhance LingQ. Maybe J. Pierre will get some cool ideas for LWT. Maybe I'll even get inspired to hack something together myself, though that currently seems unlikely. :-) To keep things simple, perhaps we should pick the 3 features that we want the most. For example, here are mine: 1. I wish I could instantly import web pages from anywhere: From my browser, from a link sent via email, and from Android's "share this link" feature. 2. I wish I could look up words and phrases on my phone, using either a built-in dictionary or a list of websites. 3. I wish I could I could push a button and export the 100 most important words to my Anki deck, with context and L2 definitions. How about you? Thank you for helping build a list of ideas for future programmers! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5639 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 2 of 13 27 March 2012 at 12:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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My top 3 were:
1. Ability to use a software dictionary and not have a rollover/dictionary pop up on every single word click. 2. Ability to read longish texts, minimum of a chapter at a time, and parallel texts for LR. 3. Be simple to upload, organise and find texts and be able to see all your languages simultaneously. What's up with having to change between lanugages all the time? I got inspired (or annoyed enough) and just hacked together my own :) I was planning on adding grabbing text directly from the Wikipedia because they have a nice API, but I find copy & paste of the text I want works better. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5560 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 13 27 March 2012 at 2:05am | IP Logged | |||||
That's a really good question. It's not like the software should even have to ask; automatic language identification is a (mostly) solved problem. What kind of electronic dictionaries did you use in your program? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6977 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 13 27 March 2012 at 7:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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1. It would be great if the software could recognize split/phrasal verbs, or (probably
more realistically) if it could let us select non-consecutive words/morphemes to look up or add to our database. 2. I don't know about LingQ, but LWT is hopeless at recognizing word boundaries in Japanese. I know it's possible to do well, because in my opinion rikai-chan and rikai- kun (the browser addons for Firefox and Chrome, respectively) do an excellent job of this. 3. This one is hard to explain. When the user sets up an online dictionary, the usual procedure is to look up "TEST" or something else with the dictionary and copy-paste the resulting URL into a field on the user settings page. But for some online dictionaries, the URL doesn't change when you look up a word. In these cases it would be nice if the software could at least enter our selected word into the dictionary's "search" field so that we only have to click a button to go to the results page. Edited by Lucky Charms on 27 March 2012 at 7:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| t123 Diglot Senior Member South Africa https://github.com/t Joined 5639 days ago 139 posts - 226 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans | Message 5 of 13 27 March 2012 at 9:45am | IP Logged | |||||
Not so much having to choose language when displaying a particular text (although Google has an autodetect API), but just listing all of them. I guess if you only have one or two languages it's OK. It such a nuisance in both LingQ and LWT that before you can do anything you must pick a language. By software dictionary I meant a user program (your no 2, but on a computer instead of phone). I use GoldenDict and I have a Langenscheidt German dictionary. What's really irritating in LingQ is the popup on rollover, it makes it impossible to select a word so I can't use my dictionary and their builtin one is pretty rubbish. LWT works much better in this case. I'm planning on doing Anki support this weekend, and once my shiny new iPad arrives I'll look at mobile support. @Lucky Charms Are you parsing your text with Mecab beforehand? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5894 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 6 of 13 27 March 2012 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Silverlight streaming video subtitle download.
Very often subtitles are very poorly synchronised, usually late, and disappear too quickly. For subtitled YouTube videos, there are browser applications that enable you to directly download subtitles to a text file. Once in a text file, you can read along. Then they are perfectly synced, never late, and stay as long as you like. Subtitle text files are far superior for L2 learning than just subtitles. However, most good subtitled material on the Internet is streamed in Silverlight or other media. There doesn't seem to be any way to capture or download the subtitles to a text file. I have searched everywhere. The only current reasonable compromise is a screen-capture video recorder, such as WMRecorder. So my wishlist is a Silverlight subtitles downloader. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lwtproject Pentaglot Senior Member Netherlands https://learning-wit Joined 4920 days ago 149 posts - 264 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, German, English, Mandarin Studies: Italian | Message 7 of 13 27 March 2012 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am able to install LWT in 5 minutes. It's easy in my opinion. I am able to use LWT on my phone, but the phone screen is too small, and the dictionary web pages contain too many ads. So buy an iPad if you want to run it on a mobile device. And don't forget to blame Apple for Mobile Safari's poor frameset implementation.
Use Mecab, insert spaces automatically, and import into LWT. You can also use LWT with 1 char = word setting and import a dictionary with the 10,000 most frequent words. Makes it a lot easier then. Edited by lwtproject on 27 March 2012 at 4:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5409 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 8 of 13 27 March 2012 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For Japanese, I use Wakaru on my iPad. You can load any text from the web and clicking on a word brings up the dictionary at the bottom of the screen. It can also create automatic flashcards. Not bad.
I wouldn't mind an app that automatically translates vocabulary onto a second line and aligns it with the original. No work needed, everything is there is you need it. However, until they make a Japanese app that includes pitch accent, this kind of activity is always going to be marginal for me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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