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Readlang, my language reading site | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4285 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 129 of 131 28 November 2014 at 5:14pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Patrick, thanks for your interest in the development of the site, and for your
suggestions on the feedback forum. Readlang is my first venture of this kind, and my plan was to create the ideal tool for me to read in Spanish, and to try to polish it to the point where it was useful enough to others that I could sell subscriptions and provide myself a living from it. I'm still working towards that goal. It's taking longer than I hoped but that's par for the course for any software project. All things considered I'm very happy with how it's being received and how things are going. I hope to blog again with a followup to my "story so far" post (http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped- language-learning- web-app.html), but in the meantime, continuing in the same honest vein, here's how things have gone recently: - Revenues have increased from <$100 / month at the start of the year, to an average of $500 / month for the past 4 months. After server and API costs this leaves a PRE- tax profit of only about £250 / month. Still far from enough to live on. - Added epub import (pretty basic - just converts to plain text without proper chapter support) - Many visual improvements, hints for new users, emails for new users, trying to make things nice and simple to use - Completely re-implemented the Word List page, with a design inspired by gmail, allowing you to filter, search, export, edit, delete, etc.. - From July to November this year I took a break from all but essential maintenance to do some freelance software development work to save up money again. I'm back to work on Readlang full time again for the moment. There are a ton of features I would like to work on, but my top priorities are to make it as simple and easy to use as possible, and to figure out ways to reach a wider audience. If anyone has any ideas - I'm all ears! I understand your concern that it's a one-man operation, but I'm fully committed to keeping it up and running long term. It's making a small profit so running out of money won't be a problem. There is a risk that if it doesn't keep growing, I'll stop actively improving it, but I plan to keep maintaining it whatever happens. My backup plan if Readlang isn't successful is to use it as a calling card to get future software work, and I've sold a handful of lifetime memberships, so it's very important to me to keep it online and working well long term. Of course there's always the "bus factor", i.e. what happens if I get run over by a bus? To be honest, I haven't planned for this yet, although if I get my act together I will arrange for a friend to open source the whole code base if anything like that happened. Thanks again for all the support I got on this forum, this was the first place I shared Readlang and found some initial users. Without that positive response and encouragement I received here I probably wouldn't still be working on it now. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |
| yuriFromRoma Groupie Italy Joined 4716 days ago 48 posts - 69 votes Speaks: Italian* Studies: English, Russian | Message 130 of 131 12 December 2014 at 1:22am | IP Logged |
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I've just started using this site and I liked so much that I've decided to pay for it (I'm wam.idomeneo).
Arguably, one of the best tools available so far. Kudos to Steve! I have two questions: 1 - What happens when "usefulness" is selected in the "word list" tab? Does it just rearrange the word list so that the starred items precede the unstarred ones? *EDIT* 2 - How does Readlang estimate the level of a text? I'm learning Russian and I've checked a bunch of shared texts estimated as C1/C2 - which is quite above my actual level - but I'm not sure I find them as challenging as I would expect from a C-like level source. Edited by yuriFromRoma on 12 December 2014 at 1:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4285 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 131 of 131 15 December 2014 at 9:24pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Yuri,
Thanks very much for the feedback and for upgrading your account! 1. Usefulness will sort the words to show the most frequently occurring words in the language first. To be specific, the frequency is obtained from a corpus of film subtitles available here: Frequency Lists 2. It uses a custom algorithm which is a combination of the Automated Readability Index and the percentage of the most frequent 2000 words which appear in the text. It's far from perfect and I'd like to open source this as a small module to hopefully encourage others to contribute and calibrate it so that it gives more sensible results for different languages. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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