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Readlang, my language reading site

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SteveRidout
Diglot
Groupie
Spain
readlang.com
Joined 4242 days ago

65 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 41 of 131
05 April 2013 at 5:56pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
SteveRidout wrote:
36000 Euros per year actually sounds pretty good,
especially since this could continue even if I wasn't improving the site.
Oh god
please no. Look at this forum.


Quoting that is a bit unfair without also quoting my followup sentence:

SteveRidout wrote:
(In reality though, I have enough ideas that I'll
*definitely* continue to improve it if it gets to that stage!)


My point is simply that it's less work to keep a site running smoothly compared to
improving it with new features. Anyway, my hope is that I'll be able to keep adding new
features for a long time, but that all depends on if it's successful, at this point it's
still an experiment.
1 person has voted this message useful



chokofingrz
Pentaglot
Senior Member
England
Joined 5149 days ago

241 posts - 430 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian
Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish

 
 Message 42 of 131
11 April 2013 at 2:14pm | IP Logged 
This readlang site is pretty cool, I just tried it on a German newspaper article and when I came to the flashcards, I could feel my brain working harder and learning better than it does when I do a set on Memrise.

In terms of feedback, my main concern is that the site is not that intuitive for beginners.

1) You have to find and import your own texts (easy enough with Google search and the bookmarklet, but it's still a barrier). So having a mini library to choose from, or at least one or two 'demo' texts per language, might be a good idea.

2) Once you're reading your text, it's not clear what the goal is or what the next step will be. Some brief instructions would be nice. Maybe a progress indicator or an overview of the cards you're creating. I still don't understand why it says "0% - 45%" at the bottom of the screen, or how to make this number change.

Now that I've figured some of it out, I'm sure I will be using this regularly. I would probably even pay in the region of €5-7 per month once the website seemed a bit more established and mature. Don't sell yourself short, your readlang model has the potential to go up against the big boys of online learning and make you some money.
2 persons have voted this message useful



SteveRidout
Diglot
Groupie
Spain
readlang.com
Joined 4242 days ago

65 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 43 of 131
11 April 2013 at 7:25pm | IP Logged 
chokofingrz wrote:
This readlang site is pretty cool, I just tried it on a German newspaper
article and when I came to the flashcards, I could feel my brain working harder and learning
better than it does when I do a set on Memrise.

In terms of feedback, my main concern is that the site is not that intuitive for beginners.

1) You have to find and import your own texts (easy enough with Google search and the
bookmarklet, but it's still a barrier). So having a mini library to choose from, or at least one
or two 'demo' texts per language, might be a good idea.

2) Once you're reading your text, it's not clear what the goal is or what the next step will be.
Some brief instructions would be nice. Maybe a progress indicator or an overview of the cards
you're creating. I still don't understand why it says "0% - 45%" at the bottom of the screen, or
how to make this number change.

Now that I've figured some of it out, I'm sure I will be using this regularly. I would probably
even pay in the region of €5-7 per month once the website seemed a bit more established and
mature. Don't sell yourself short, your readlang model has the potential to go up against the
big boys of online learning and make you some money.


Thanks a lot for the feedback, it's very encouraging!

1) True, I have plans to allow sharing content under a creative commons licence, and to suggest
reading material to users based on reading difficulty.

2) The percentage at the bottom of the screen indicates how far through the article you are,
e.g. the first word on the page you are reading is at 0%, and the last at 45%, I agree this is
strange, but actual page numbers don't make sense since you can resize the font or the browser
window at any time, maybe a progress bar is more appropriate. To change pages you should click
the left or right margins of the text. My goal with the reader page is to make it relaxing and
distraction free, like reading a Kindle.

I completely agree that it's confusing for new users, and I will definitely work to improve this
before removing the 'beta' label. There's just so much to do though, new features to implement
and existing ones to polish. Right now I'm experimenting with synchronising audio files to the
texts which I'm quite excited about.
1 person has voted this message useful





songlines
Pro Member
Canada
flickr.com/photos/cp
Joined 5169 days ago

729 posts - 1056 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: French
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 44 of 131
30 April 2013 at 6:51am | IP Logged 
Thanks for doing this, SteveRideout! - I've tried it out, and really like the clear layout and general ease of
use. Also the capability to see the words in context when reading the flashcard.- Came back to this
thread to check how to select more than word as a unit for translation/learning.

One suggestion: I understand you may not feel comfortable going with a "fee-based" model at this early
stage while you're still developing the programme, but what about adding a small "donate" button or "tip jar"
via Paypal? (Maybe with an option, if/as you approach a time when you decide to implement a fee, of having
the donation later credited/part credited towards the fee?)

I don't expect it'll be a huge moneymaker (are these things ever?), but nevertheless - it'll give some of us
grateful language-learners a way to demonstrate a more tangilble appreciation of your work...

- Just a thought.

Edited by songlines on 30 April 2013 at 7:06am

1 person has voted this message useful



SteveRidout
Diglot
Groupie
Spain
readlang.com
Joined 4242 days ago

65 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 45 of 131
07 May 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged 
songlines wrote:
what about adding a small "donate" button or "tip jar"
via Paypal?


Thanks very much! I've added a PayPal donate button on this page:

http://readlang.com/donate

Like you say I don't expect to get much from this, and I'm more interested in getting
people to use the site and give feedback at this stage, but any donations would
certainly be a morale booster :-).

New Video Feature

I've been busy working on integration with YouTube, so you can read text in sync with
videos. I've just put an example online:

http://readlang.com/
library/518907472dc6e1ca01000061/scroll/0


It's the whole story of "The Little Prince" in Spanish - "El Principito". (Audio is
missing for the penultimate chapter, but all the text is there). You can also sync up
your own texts with YouTube videos by using the YouTube tab in the sidebar. It's still
not as friendly and polished as it should be but it works so I thought it would be nice
to share, please let me know if you want any help.

Hope you find this feature useful, would love some feedback on it!
2 persons have voted this message useful



Crush
Tetraglot
Senior Member
ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5825 days ago

1622 posts - 2299 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto
Studies: Basque

 
 Message 46 of 131
02 June 2013 at 12:58pm | IP Logged 
I just saw that you can share texts and put them into the public library, cool! This site really is great, the interface is really nice and relaxing. A couple things that i found were missing from LingQ/LWT:
-being able to associate conjugated verb forms with their infinitives. It would be amazing to, perhaps, see the translation of the verb and hovering your mouse over it see extra information, for example which tense it's in, which person(s), mood, it's infinitive form, etc.
-similar to that, associating declined nouns/adjectives with their "dictionary" form.
-its impracticality for learning words with separated forms. In Spanish, for example, reflexive verbs. In German, verbs with separable prepositions and reflexive verbs (aufwachen, ich wache auf). In English, phrasal verbs (to wake up, throw out, etc.). And so on. Even if the system can't match them automatically for you, it would be cool to have a way to manually select two different words and connect them, since they won't always follow one another.
-handling of entire books. Maybe you could use a special character for people to mark chapters, something like \\\CHAPTER_NAME\\\. Clicking on the document would then unfold a list of chapters and you could select the chapter you want to read. With LWT i always uploaded my documents in chapters.

And a couple small notes on the interface, for the most part i think it's really quite intuitive, or at least really simple to use. When clicking on a document to read, however, the buttons look like text boxes to fill in information. To be honest, i really don't think you need any sort of confirmation, clicking on a text should take you directly to the reading page. You could put a button to the right of the text near the check box to delete a text and perhaps next to the document's title on the reading page you could add a "Jump to the beginning" button if you think it's really necessary.

All in all, i think i honestly already enjoy it more than both LWT/LingQ. I love the reading screen and the little sidebar! I started studying a little computer programming just because i wanted to be able to add in certain (admittedly rather complicated) features that i felt were missing from LWT. Thanks for the work and i can't wait to see what it'll look like by the time you pull it out of beta!

EDIT: Also, what would the possibility of adding new languages and perhaps even non-Google dictionaries be? What was the criteria for selecting the currently supported languages? Sorry if you've already answered this.

SteveRidout wrote:
I've updated the site now so that if you select adjacent words in the reader they will
merge to create translations and flashcards with phrase translations. Hope this is
useful!
I just saw this. It's a nice idea, but what happens when two unrelated words are next to each other? Or for words that aren't right next to each other?

Another thing i liked about LWT was that it tells you how many words a text has (and how many of them are "new", though since there are so many different verb/noun/adjective forms it's not really that accurate as every verb form is treated as a separate word). Still, it was fun to see and nice when deciding on something to read.

Also, a nice dictionary for Catalan is:
http://www.multilingue.cat/

Edited by Crush on 02 June 2013 at 5:11pm

1 person has voted this message useful



SteveRidout
Diglot
Groupie
Spain
readlang.com
Joined 4242 days ago

65 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 47 of 131
02 June 2013 at 11:19pm | IP Logged 
Crush wrote:
I just saw that you can share texts and put them into the public library,
cool! This site really is great, the interface is really nice and relaxing. A couple
things that i found were missing from LingQ/LWT:
-being able to associate conjugated verb forms with their infinitives. It would be amazing
to, perhaps, see the translation of the verb and hovering your mouse over it see extra
information, for example which tense it's in, which person(s), mood, it's infinitive form,
etc.
-similar to that, associating declined nouns/adjectives with their "dictionary" form.


I agree that detecting word families like this would be very cool, but it's probably too
difficult to tackle at the moment. Unless anyone knows of a service/database to provide
all this information without having to do lots of work specific to each language?

Crush wrote:

-its impracticality for learning words with separated forms. In Spanish, for example,
reflexive verbs. In German, verbs with separable prepositions and reflexive verbs
(aufwachen, ich wache auf). In English, phrasal verbs (to wake up, throw out, etc.). And
so on. Even if the system can't match them automatically for you, it would be cool to have
a way to manually select two different words and connect them, since they won't always
follow one another.


For now the only way is to translate the whole phrase, but I know that in German sometimes
the parts of the verb can be separated by many words. To select two separated words
*without selecting the ones in between* would be very tricky, both in terms of the UI, and
in terms of exactly what data Readlang should send to google translate.

Crush wrote:

-handling of entire books. Maybe you could use a special character for people to mark
chapters, something like \\\CHAPTER_NAME\\\. Clicking on the document would then unfold a
list of chapters and you could select the chapter you want to read. With LWT i always
uploaded my documents in chapters.


A way to handle chapters is planned. I'd like to work on proper ePub support, but this may
take a while, so I may consider something like you suggest as a shorter term fix.

Crush wrote:

And a couple small notes on the interface, for the most part i think it's really quite
intuitive, or at least really simple to use. When clicking on a document to read, however,
the buttons look like text boxes to fill in information. To be honest, i really don't
think you need any sort of confirmation, clicking on a text should take you directly to
the reading page. You could put a button to the right of the text near the check box to
delete a text and perhaps next to the document's title on the reading page you could add a
"Jump to the beginning" button if you think it's really necessary.


I think you're completely right about this, I'll work on it, thanks!

Crush wrote:

All in all, i think i honestly already enjoy it more than both LWT/LingQ. I love the
reading screen and the little sidebar! I started studying a little computer programming
just because i wanted to be able to add in certain (admittedly rather complicated)
features that i felt were missing from LWT. Thanks for the work and i can't wait to see
what it'll look like by the time you pull it out of beta!


Thanks, if you have any more suggestions I'd love to hear them, either here or on the
feedback forum: https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general

Crush wrote:

EDIT: Also, what would the possibility of adding new languages and perhaps even non-Google
dictionaries be? What was the criteria for selecting the currently supported languages?
Sorry if you've already answered this.


It's certainly possible, for some language pairs there's already a WordReference
dictionary in the sidebar, and I would like to get richer dictionary data integrated into
the site. The criteria for adding languages so far is rather simple: If someone asks me to
add a language and it has easily detectable word boundaries, I add it! (Difficulty with
detecting word boundaries is preventing Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.)

Crush wrote:

SteveRidout wrote:
I've updated the site now so that if you select adjacent words in the
reader they will
merge to create translations and flashcards with phrase translations. Hope this is
useful!
I just saw this. It's a nice idea, but what happens when two unrelated
words are next to each other? Or for words that aren't right next to each other?


If you select two or more adjacent words, I send the combined phrase to google translate
instead of the individual words. Words which aren't adjacent, or which have a period, an
exclamation mark, or a question mark between them are considered completely independent.

Crush wrote:

Another thing i liked about LWT was that it tells you how many words a text has (and how
many of them are "new", though since there are so many different verb/noun/adjective forms
it's not really that accurate as every verb form is treated as a separate word). Still, it
was fun to see and nice when deciding on something to read.


I've got something like this in mind. First I want to use an algorithm to estimate the
general difficulty of the texts, and after that I may look into a more user specific
measure, based on your history.

Crush wrote:

Also, a nice dictionary for Catalan is:
http://www.multilingue.cat/


I had a look but it doesn't seem to support embedding in another webpage the way I'm using
WordReference, so I probably can't make use of it.

Thanks for taking your time to give all this feedback, I really appreciate it.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Crush
Tetraglot
Senior Member
ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5825 days ago

1622 posts - 2299 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto
Studies: Basque

 
 Message 48 of 131
03 June 2013 at 1:46am | IP Logged 
SteveRidout wrote:
Crush wrote:
I just saw that you can share texts and put them into the public library,
cool! This site really is great, the interface is really nice and relaxing. A couple
things that i found were missing from LingQ/LWT:
-being able to associate conjugated verb forms with their infinitives. It would be amazing
to, perhaps, see the translation of the verb and hovering your mouse over it see extra
information, for example which tense it's in, which person(s), mood, it's infinitive form,
etc.
-similar to that, associating declined nouns/adjectives with their "dictionary" form.


I agree that detecting word families like this would be very cool, but it's probably too
difficult to tackle at the moment. Unless anyone knows of a service/database to provide
all this information without having to do lots of work specific to each language?

I was thinking of something like Verbix which provides verb conjugations for a large number of languages. Another possibility would just be to have the user manually add in the infinitive so that the system would store them all as part of the same word (and potentially recognize the word the next time you see it).

SteveRidout wrote:

Crush wrote:

-its impracticality for learning words with separated forms. In Spanish, for example,
reflexive verbs. In German, verbs with separable prepositions and reflexive verbs
(aufwachen, ich wache auf). In English, phrasal verbs (to wake up, throw out, etc.). And
so on. Even if the system can't match them automatically for you, it would be cool to have
a way to manually select two different words and connect them, since they won't always
follow one another.

For now the only way is to translate the whole phrase, but I know that in German sometimes
the parts of the verb can be separated by many words. To select two separated words
*without selecting the ones in between* would be very tricky, both in terms of the UI, and
in terms of exactly what data Readlang should send to google translate.

I would just send it as is, in the order they're in. Eg. "Nunca se puede acordar de...", i'd just send "se acordar". For the most part google recognizes them and there's always the possibility of checking the dictionary and modifying the definition yourself. I don't think detecting these words should be the system's job, but it would be nice for the user to be able to select them manually.

SteveRidout wrote:

Crush wrote:

-handling of entire books. Maybe you could use a special character for people to mark
chapters, something like \\\CHAPTER_NAME\\\. Clicking on the document would then unfold a
list of chapters and you could select the chapter you want to read. With LWT i always
uploaded my documents in chapters.

A way to handle chapters is planned. I'd like to work on proper ePub support, but this may
take a while, so I may consider something like you suggest as a shorter term fix.

That would be great! :D

SteveRidout wrote:

Crush wrote:

EDIT: Also, what would the possibility of adding new languages and perhaps even non-Google
dictionaries be? What was the criteria for selecting the currently supported languages?
Sorry if you've already answered this.


It's certainly possible, for some language pairs there's already a WordReference
dictionary in the sidebar, and I would like to get richer dictionary data integrated into
the site. The criteria for adding languages so far is rather simple: If someone asks me to
add a language and it has easily detectable word boundaries, I add it! (Difficulty with
detecting word boundaries is preventing Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.)

In that case, i'd love to see support for Galician and Basque :)

SteveRidout wrote:

Crush wrote:

SteveRidout wrote:
I've updated the site now so that if you select adjacent words in the
reader they will
merge to create translations and flashcards with phrase translations. Hope this is
useful!
I just saw this. It's a nice idea, but what happens when two unrelated
words are next to each other? Or for words that aren't right next to each other?

If you select two or more adjacent words, I send the combined phrase to google translate
instead of the individual words. Words which aren't adjacent, or which have a period, an
exclamation mark, or a question mark between them are considered completely independent.

I realize that, i was more making a point that if there are two words you don't know, for example, maybe i don't know what "olvidada gruta" means in the phrase "Nos adentramos en aquella olvidada gruta..", clicking on both words will combine them into one. If you can make the distinction between words that should be together and words that aren't, i think it'd make adding support for "split" words/phrasal verbs a little easier.
[/QUOTE]


SteveRidout wrote:

Crush wrote:

Also, a nice dictionary for Catalan is:
http://www.multilingue.cat/


I had a look but it doesn't seem to support embedding in another webpage the way I'm using
WordReference, so I probably can't make use of it.

Bummer, it's really quite nice. Most of the comprehensive online dictionaries i've found are Catalan-only, others tend to have a relatively small number of words.

SteveRidout wrote:

Thanks for taking your time to give all this feedback, I really appreciate it.

Thank you for putting it all together!


1 person has voted this message useful



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