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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 4078 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 41 of 131 05 April 2013 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Quoting that is a bit unfair without also quoting my followup sentence:
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 4985 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 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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 4078 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 43 of 131 11 April 2013 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 5005 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 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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 4078 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 45 of 131 07 May 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 5661 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 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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.
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 4078 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 47 of 131 02 June 2013 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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?
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.
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.
I think you're completely right about this, I'll work on it, thanks!
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
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.)
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'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.
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 5661 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 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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).
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.
That would be great! :D
In that case, i'd love to see support for Galician and Basque :)
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]
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.
Thank you for putting it all together! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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