Creator of the Readlang here. I started this at the very end of 2012, and save for a few months contracting have been working on it full time since, doing everything myself. Growth has been slower than I’d like but just enough to keep me motivated.
It's a freemium webapp, originally designed to reduce the frustration of practicing my Spanish by reading novels, and later adapted to work on any webpage as a browser extension.
I always appreciate it when people share details about their business, so here are some numbers from the first 5 months of 2015 (Jan - May):
Google Analytics - Sessions: 120,000, Unique visitors: 53,489
Signups - 13,658
Revenue - $4768 (average of $953 / month)
Not spectacular, but when I look back, it took 16 months to make the first $1000 (http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-l...), and right now it’s making more than that every month! It’s a long road but I’m very excited about it’s future.
Wow, these are the stories we need to hear more of!! I'm a bit tired of the overnight success stories getting all the attention.
If such an awesome product has taken so long to make something in the region of 1000 dollars a month then perhaps creating a startup is not as easy as so many people make it out to be...
I'm vaguely trying to learn spanish using Duolingo, but haven't been very diligent. I was hoping your chrome extension could be a more passive way of learning that integrates into what I already do, and which would let me stick with it as a result.
Unfortunately, the current version isn't. Unless I'm using it wrong, here's the process of learning spanish with your extension:
- I'm on a page
- I decide to learn spanish
- I click the extension button
- i click random words and see the spanish word for it
There's a lot of friction (I have to steps 2 and 3) for not a lot of pay off (I can choose to click words and see what the spanish version is). Also, the fact that it gets in the way of every link means I immediately turned it off.
May I suggest an alternate version:
- on every single page the extension is active
- pick some number of words (1% maybe?) to translate into spanish, while keeping the text in english. Underline them in green and let me mouseover if I don't understand
- when I'm reading the text, I will come across these spanish words and learn them in context
Much lower friction, and doesn't get in the way so I won't turn it off.
FYI, I discovered this a week or two ago and when I tried to pay using PayPal something timed out and I was unable to complete the transaction. I tried several times, and I don't think it was a PayPal issue. Eventually I just gave up.
It is pretty impressive and very usable. I see a great future for it.
My comments:
1 - it is not clear which words go into "my words" e.g. I mark one, then the one after, but I don't want it as an idiom, I just want two separate words.
2 - this causes some confusion when going to the flash cards I get (imagine it's in a foreigh language) "the plane", "the plane is" "plane is taking off" "plane is taking of the ground" - each in a single "flash card item". I'm sure it's due to me abusing / testing marking words
I don't have UI / UX solutions to both issues sadly, I'm sure you gave it a lot of thought.
Otherwise, this is a great, fully functional website, and I wish you will make a lot of money. I'm tempted to become a paying user. Looking at DuoLingo's recent valuation, I would say that there is a market for this.
Great example of a real bootstrapped SaaS.
Hope you get to see it grow further. Sounds like a valid YC submission if you ask me, worth a shot...
Great to see your language learning website! I'm developing similar ideas all the time, but I'm having trouble earning the first dollar.
A few questions:
Do you feel trying to do every language is effective? Do you have trouble with any particular languages? Do you feel google translate is good enough for learners?
On your site you seem to say audio was a mis-step. Will you be giving it another go?
It might be interesting to offer the reverse: incremental translation of source material that's in the reader's known language, into the target language.
That is, simply by switching into the mode, each page the user visits would have some of its words translated to the target language. They'd have distinctive styling, and a simple hover or click would show the original word. You'd always be reading a mosaic of both languages
As they hover/click for clarification less often, more and more words would be target-translated... building the new language vocabulary over time.
Of course, this doesn't teach the new language's syntax/ordering... but even that could maybe be incrementall mixed-in over time. Perhaps when there's a clear 1:1 sentence map, a sentence could (with some probability linked to how many words have already flipped) flip to the target-language's order-of-presentation, even if most of its individual words are still native.
Amazing job, I'll become soon one of your paying customers :)
After playing with it for a while a first suggestion. I noticed that it's possible to export the frequency of the words so you have this information, for my use case it would be very useful to have this information in the word list (when the word is expanded).
This is because when I'm reviewing the words in my word list and deleting those I feel are not very usual so I can concentrate on those that are, however this is done just by guesswork as I don't really know which words are more common, having easy access to the frequency of the word in the word list would allow me to do it in a more efficient way.
Do you do some kind of text processing, before or after sending the words to Google Translate? Do you analyze the translation mistakes, in order to iteratively improve the results? How much do you pay for the API?
and stumbled across your comment. I thought it was neat (I'm using -not- TransOver for the moment).
Here's what I can think of, off the top of my head, but first some background:
I'm acquiring Spanish right now and simultaneously scratching the surface of German, Russian, Hebrew, and Persian. They have a lower priority, but I'm making progress.
As you may have noticed, English is not my first language. I learned it out of necessity (resources I needed were in English).
I read a lot, and in the beginning, my head hurt as I read stuff written in English. I had MediaDico on my computer to translate from English to French.
I struggled with idioms (I needed to read several examples of an idiom to get the gist of it)... But I can pin-point the exact moment where my learning was about to soar: I was in the living room and I decided that my computer experience had to shift to English. This means that even when I was to search for stuff, I'd do it in English. My brain bled. Something trivial to search for in a language I knew, something I already had the keywords ready, not in my mind but in my fingertips, to search Google for, would take me way longer to think about, formulate, and come up with keywords for, in English.
What would be cool is this:
- A user doesn't have to click on on a word to translate it. The extension makes a sort of histogram of the most used words or expressions (a frequency list of the page), and automatically translates them. Since they're the most used words or expressions on the page, the person will be exposed to them often: "accidentally on purpose" rote repetition. This will be useful for the next step:
- The extension _remembers_ (keeps a list of) which words (should) already have been learned by the user (which words he has been exposed to the most), and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language.
- The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that?
- I had a message saying "This is a very large page". Maybe the extension can translate stuff the user is most likely to see first, and as the user browses, it does stuff.. Think Python generators.
There’s a lot to like here. It reminds me of this great article I read about someone learning French by reading Harry Potter many years ago. I can’t find the first reference to it, but it seems a lot of people take this approach now and numerous articles have been written about this method.
https://www.google.com/search?q=harry+potter+language+learni...
Your content marketing is great, but you don’t do it enough. Good startups ship both code and marketing efforts on a regular basis…ideally, you should shoot for something going out weekly.
It’s great that you shared your numbers, but snapshots are less helpful than data or information that shows momentum. When I’m trying to figure out if a company is doing well, numbers at a fixed point in time usually isn’t enough data to help me determine what the company looks like in the future.
Early stage startups should try for at least 10%/weekly growth on your core metric. If you’re not hitting that, make sure you’re only spending time/energy on tasks to hit those numbers.
Onboarding experience can use some work. There’s not enough guidance in the app to make me feel confident that I can use your site to learn a language on my own. For instance, when I first login, I had no idea what I was supposed to do first.
Even though I saw Upload Text button and the Web Reader link/button…I naturally clicked on the first story…which lead me to a page with even less guidance. I’ve never learned a language by reading and I couldn't find any help for best practices to using your site or how I’m supposed to turn this exposure into language proficiency.
The highlight to translate UX feels promising, but I found myself wanting a way to see the full english text side by side with the translated portion.
Why make me click twice to learn words through the flashcard interface? (tab then button) Also, if you want me to do it everyday, offer me a daily email or sms to practice. Each one of those emails is an opportunity to upgrade them down the road.
Speaking of upgrade triggers, it sure feels like you make it hard to upgrade or pay right away right from the get go. I think it’s because you’re shooting to upgrade people who are using it the most. That seems way too nice. :)
As far as your feature list is concerned on the marketing side…they feel very YOU centric rather than USER centric.
http://readlang.com/features
I have to do all this work to figure out why the feature is better for me. If the copy is one step removed from me selling myself, it’ll be two steps removed from me being able to sell it to a friend.
I read a couple Harry Potter books in Spanish a decade ago. It's always helpful to read. Those books are a little hard for a beginner. I made words list for each chapter, which I lost. I think it's helpful to study the words then read chapter.
I don't suppose there are digital copies that can be parsed floating around?
Apart from that one Harry Potter article, I haven't found content marketing to be that effective in attracting new users, mainly because I haven't invested enough time in it. The low hanging fruit I'm going after first is to add more landing pages and product information about Readlang. Later I might try getting language teachers and bloggers to help out with the content marketing, I can't see myself doing it frequently since it takes too much time from working on the product. Definitely need more content for SEO, almost all my search engine traffic queries at the moment contain the term "readlang".
Being bootstrapped, my core metric for the moment is revenue and the graph is looking pretty bumpy at the moment, I may follow up with a blog post digging into the details.
Onboarding - I completely agree, I started playing around with more walkthough hints, using a rabbit character (a la Clippy) that guides you though the process, but abandoned it since adding more complexity felt wrong when the underlying UI should probably be clearer. Still plan to add a nice checklist of items that new users are encouraged to complete.
Love that Kathy Sierra article about learning - remember reading "Head First Design Patterns" about 10 years ago, first impression was how tacky all the clip-art looked, but I ended up really impressed with how engaging it was. At the moment, Readlang is still best for people who already know they want to practice by reading and just want a better, more convenient method. Long term, I want to make make it a slightly more guided and engaging experience. This could include personal recommendations of articles, gamification around both reading and flashcard practice, and social features e.g. write a summary of the previous chapter in Spanish, discuss the text with other users.
I agree a full English translation would be nice for beginner learners, ideally a real human translation, similar to a parallel text. For now the product is targeted at intermediate and advanced learners but definitely something to consider as it broadens to appeal to beginners.
Opt in to the daily flashcard email is currently presented once you finish a flashcard session - pretty hidden - I'll make it more visible! (note: currently all users who've translated a bunch of words get a lifecycle email 2 weeks after signing up with a plain text version of a flashcard)
I'll experiment with adding a way to upgrade from the get go. I was concerned that upselling before users had a chance to play with the product could scare them off, but will try it out!
Great work here! I wonder if you'd be interested in some form of integration.
I'm a partner at http://green-bridge.org and we've been bootstrapping our stuff for a year now. It's a tool used for over 15 years in the classroom but we only just begun to bring business aspect to it. Grmmr shows visually the grammar of English (we're slowly expanding onto other languages). We're focused just on the grammar aspect of things.
You have exactly what we were planning on building. We would love to add our shapes atop of the translations so it's easier to visualize. A lot of schools and ESL groups in colleges use our tools and they definitely will benefit from using your stuff along with our visuals.
Let me know if this is something you might be interested in.
Looks cool! Some of it seems very intuitive, like the arrow pointing back to indicate the past, or the double arrow to indicate plural. I could imagine a set of symbols like this being a very nice addition to a dictionary allowing fast identification of the part of speech and conjugation.
My TODO list is already way too long with core Readlang stuff to do this kind of integration at the moment, currently I don't even detect whether a word is a noun, verb, etc. It's all handled by google and the external dictionaries. I look forward to following your progress though. Good luck!
I use Rikaichan (which works really well for Japanese, not sure about other languages as I've not tried) It covers a significant portion of this in my opinion. The original is for Firefox, but there's also a chrome port under the name "rikaikun".
That said, I'll take a look at this, maybe it's cool. :-)
I think for Japanese, Rikaichan probably beats Readlang right now because it can detect word boundaries, and probably has other features specific to Japanese that I can't afford to spend time on with Readlang yet.
It would be awesome to improve Japanese support later after it's achieved success with the main European languages.
Watched the videos to fully understand what this is and wow, just wow. I used to be fluent in Spanish and lost it years ago for lack of use but this is going to be an easy way for me to catch up seeing as how I read so much during the day. Congrats, this is an amazing project.
I tried German, where the first text is the German version of Let It Go, and there are quite some mistakes in the text (wrong capitalization, wrong spaces). Even more evident when the YouTube video itself actually contains the text.
I like the idea of doing two things at once but you often end up doing both things poorly. There's a high likelyhood that you will learn somethings incorrectly due to machine translation errors, even in popular languages. For other language combinations, English-Chineese for example, Google translate is really bad. Frequent and repeated exposure to a language is the best way to learn. This product could help but learning a language is like loosing weight, there aren't really any short cuts. You still have to work hard.
Learning a language is going to take a lot of time and effort, no argument there.
But not all methods are equally effective so anything that reduces the time or effort required, even if just by 10%, is technically a 'short cut'. And anything that increases your enjoyment of the process is a win, regardless of whether it saves time, since it will help maintain motivation. Losing motivation is surely the most common reason people fail to learn.
The main idea here is to reduce the friction of reading as much as possible, freeing up your attention to focus on understanding and enjoying the text. The machine translation is only used here for words and short phrases, where it's more effective than for complete sentences.
(I'll take your word for it that google translate isn't so good with English-Chinese, I'm mainly focussed on the European languages for now)
I can't select more than 3 or so words at a time before being bugged to go premium, and some words refuse to translate altogether, just bringing up the "go premium" box.
If you select 2 adjacent words it will try to combine them into a phrase and you only get 10 phrases / day for free on the free plan. You get unlimited single words for free though so you CAN continue using it heavily without paying if you like, it's just not quite as useful.
Isn't Google translate API horrible at actually translating? Both me and my wife are bilingual, and GT goes full retard for any non-trivial sentence for both of us.
How to you avoid falling foul of Google's 'unusual activity' algorithms?
There's another extension (Language Immersion for Chrome) that could've been great - it's designed to be used during regular browsing in your own language, and translates a user-defined proportion of words from your language into your target language. Unfortunately, it only works for a few pages before being blocked.
Not sure what unusual activity you're referring to, I pay for their translate API - I don't know how Language Immersion works but perhaps they are getting around paying for the API by loading a hidden version of the google translate page and scraping it - that's pure conjecture though!
Not that hard! One trick is to move to a cheaper part of the world, I'm currently spending most of my time in Madrid which is a lot cheaper than my old home of London, so socialising is easy financially. The tougher problem has been pushing through and continuing when the usage has decreased for 2 months in a row, but things always seem to turn around and improve, and as long as things are moving in the right direction long term, I have a roof over my head, and enjoy what I'm doing, I don't see the point in stopping. (My thoughts may change slightly in the coming months since we have a baby on the way!)
I use a great extension for this purpose called mingaling. It replaces words you designate with translations when they occur on any page. So as you surf you passively learn vocabulary.
Great job. A few years ago I did something very similar myself but just for arabic - www.arabicreader.net (still running but needing some TLC) - but didn't pursue it the same way you've done. I take my hat off to you!
This is a great project.
Please make the checkout page SSL-enabled only. At the moment, the extension's "Go Premium" menu link redirects to an insecure version of the page.
Can I use this to improve my english vocabulary? Sometimes I read articles but I don't know what the words mean. It would be nice if you could implement this, if not already.
Only if your native language is not English. There's been a uservoice suggestion to allow it to work in monolingual mode for ages (https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggest...) - I've been avoiding this so far since it's a big change to how the inline translations and flashcards would have to work.
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
It's a freemium webapp, originally designed to reduce the frustration of practicing my Spanish by reading novels, and later adapted to work on any webpage as a browser extension.
I always appreciate it when people share details about their business, so here are some numbers from the first 5 months of 2015 (Jan - May):
Google Analytics - Sessions: 120,000, Unique visitors: 53,489
Signups - 13,658
Revenue - $4768 (average of $953 / month)
Not spectacular, but when I look back, it took 16 months to make the first $1000 (http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-l...), and right now it’s making more than that every month! It’s a long road but I’m very excited about it’s future.
Any questions or feedback, please fire away!
[+] [-] etewiah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbiggar|10 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, the current version isn't. Unless I'm using it wrong, here's the process of learning spanish with your extension:
There's a lot of friction (I have to steps 2 and 3) for not a lot of pay off (I can choose to click words and see what the spanish version is). Also, the fact that it gets in the way of every link means I immediately turned it off.May I suggest an alternate version:
Much lower friction, and doesn't get in the way so I won't turn it off.WDYT?
[+] [-] ecdavis|10 years ago|reply
Love the site, though.
[+] [-] eranation|10 years ago|reply
My comments:
1 - it is not clear which words go into "my words" e.g. I mark one, then the one after, but I don't want it as an idiom, I just want two separate words.
2 - this causes some confusion when going to the flash cards I get (imagine it's in a foreigh language) "the plane", "the plane is" "plane is taking off" "plane is taking of the ground" - each in a single "flash card item". I'm sure it's due to me abusing / testing marking words
I don't have UI / UX solutions to both issues sadly, I'm sure you gave it a lot of thought.
Otherwise, this is a great, fully functional website, and I wish you will make a lot of money. I'm tempted to become a paying user. Looking at DuoLingo's recent valuation, I would say that there is a market for this.
Great example of a real bootstrapped SaaS.
Hope you get to see it grow further. Sounds like a valid YC submission if you ask me, worth a shot...
[+] [-] laurieg|10 years ago|reply
A few questions: Do you feel trying to do every language is effective? Do you have trouble with any particular languages? Do you feel google translate is good enough for learners?
On your site you seem to say audio was a mis-step. Will you be giving it another go?
[+] [-] gojomo|10 years ago|reply
That is, simply by switching into the mode, each page the user visits would have some of its words translated to the target language. They'd have distinctive styling, and a simple hover or click would show the original word. You'd always be reading a mosaic of both languages
As they hover/click for clarification less often, more and more words would be target-translated... building the new language vocabulary over time.
Of course, this doesn't teach the new language's syntax/ordering... but even that could maybe be incrementall mixed-in over time. Perhaps when there's a clear 1:1 sentence map, a sentence could (with some probability linked to how many words have already flipped) flip to the target-language's order-of-presentation, even if most of its individual words are still native.
[+] [-] nfc|10 years ago|reply
After playing with it for a while a first suggestion. I noticed that it's possible to export the frequency of the words so you have this information, for my use case it would be very useful to have this information in the word list (when the word is expanded).
This is because when I'm reviewing the words in my word list and deleting those I feel are not very usual so I can concentrate on those that are, however this is done just by guesswork as I don't really know which words are more common, having easy access to the frequency of the word in the word list would allow me to do it in a more efficient way.
[+] [-] transpy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jugurtha|10 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5965081
and stumbled across your comment. I thought it was neat (I'm using -not- TransOver for the moment).
Here's what I can think of, off the top of my head, but first some background:
I'm acquiring Spanish right now and simultaneously scratching the surface of German, Russian, Hebrew, and Persian. They have a lower priority, but I'm making progress.
As you may have noticed, English is not my first language. I learned it out of necessity (resources I needed were in English).
I read a lot, and in the beginning, my head hurt as I read stuff written in English. I had MediaDico on my computer to translate from English to French.
I struggled with idioms (I needed to read several examples of an idiom to get the gist of it)... But I can pin-point the exact moment where my learning was about to soar: I was in the living room and I decided that my computer experience had to shift to English. This means that even when I was to search for stuff, I'd do it in English. My brain bled. Something trivial to search for in a language I knew, something I already had the keywords ready, not in my mind but in my fingertips, to search Google for, would take me way longer to think about, formulate, and come up with keywords for, in English.
What would be cool is this:
- A user doesn't have to click on on a word to translate it. The extension makes a sort of histogram of the most used words or expressions (a frequency list of the page), and automatically translates them. Since they're the most used words or expressions on the page, the person will be exposed to them often: "accidentally on purpose" rote repetition. This will be useful for the next step:
- The extension _remembers_ (keeps a list of) which words (should) already have been learned by the user (which words he has been exposed to the most), and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language.
- The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that?
- I had a message saying "This is a very large page". Maybe the extension can translate stuff the user is most likely to see first, and as the user browses, it does stuff.. Think Python generators.
All my best !
[+] [-] a-williams|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin|10 years ago|reply
I was delighted to see that you even wrote about it yourselves on your blog. http://blog.readlang.com/2014/03/08/learn-languages-with-har...
Your content marketing is great, but you don’t do it enough. Good startups ship both code and marketing efforts on a regular basis…ideally, you should shoot for something going out weekly.
It’s great that you shared your numbers, but snapshots are less helpful than data or information that shows momentum. When I’m trying to figure out if a company is doing well, numbers at a fixed point in time usually isn’t enough data to help me determine what the company looks like in the future.
Early stage startups should try for at least 10%/weekly growth on your core metric. If you’re not hitting that, make sure you’re only spending time/energy on tasks to hit those numbers.
Onboarding experience can use some work. There’s not enough guidance in the app to make me feel confident that I can use your site to learn a language on my own. For instance, when I first login, I had no idea what I was supposed to do first.
http://cl.ly/image/253K373i1M2Y
Even though I saw Upload Text button and the Web Reader link/button…I naturally clicked on the first story…which lead me to a page with even less guidance. I’ve never learned a language by reading and I couldn't find any help for best practices to using your site or how I’m supposed to turn this exposure into language proficiency.
Highly recommend reading Kathy Sierra’s article about how learning isn’t a push model. Might give you some ideas: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2004/1...
The highlight to translate UX feels promising, but I found myself wanting a way to see the full english text side by side with the translated portion.
Why make me click twice to learn words through the flashcard interface? (tab then button) Also, if you want me to do it everyday, offer me a daily email or sms to practice. Each one of those emails is an opportunity to upgrade them down the road.
http://cl.ly/image/343r002E071K
Speaking of upgrade triggers, it sure feels like you make it hard to upgrade or pay right away right from the get go. I think it’s because you’re shooting to upgrade people who are using it the most. That seems way too nice. :)
As far as your feature list is concerned on the marketing side…they feel very YOU centric rather than USER centric. http://readlang.com/features
I have to do all this work to figure out why the feature is better for me. If the copy is one step removed from me selling myself, it’ll be two steps removed from me being able to sell it to a friend.
Here’s a link to another Kathy Sierra article talking about focusing on helping users kick ass over showing off how you kick ass (she’s the best). http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0...
I see on this page that you do have daily reminder email for flashcards…funny, I never found it when I was playing with it.
Anyway, hope this helps. Keep up the good work!
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
(It's 4am here now and my brain is fried so will go through this in detail tomorrow.)
[+] [-] melling|10 years ago|reply
I don't suppose there are digital copies that can be parsed floating around?
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
Being bootstrapped, my core metric for the moment is revenue and the graph is looking pretty bumpy at the moment, I may follow up with a blog post digging into the details.
Onboarding - I completely agree, I started playing around with more walkthough hints, using a rabbit character (a la Clippy) that guides you though the process, but abandoned it since adding more complexity felt wrong when the underlying UI should probably be clearer. Still plan to add a nice checklist of items that new users are encouraged to complete.
Love that Kathy Sierra article about learning - remember reading "Head First Design Patterns" about 10 years ago, first impression was how tacky all the clip-art looked, but I ended up really impressed with how engaging it was. At the moment, Readlang is still best for people who already know they want to practice by reading and just want a better, more convenient method. Long term, I want to make make it a slightly more guided and engaging experience. This could include personal recommendations of articles, gamification around both reading and flashcard practice, and social features e.g. write a summary of the previous chapter in Spanish, discuss the text with other users.
I agree a full English translation would be nice for beginner learners, ideally a real human translation, similar to a parallel text. For now the product is targeted at intermediate and advanced learners but definitely something to consider as it broadens to appeal to beginners.
Opt in to the daily flashcard email is currently presented once you finish a flashcard session - pretty hidden - I'll make it more visible! (note: currently all users who've translated a bunch of words get a lifecycle email 2 weeks after signing up with a plain text version of a flashcard)
I'll experiment with adding a way to upgrade from the get go. I was concerned that upselling before users had a chance to play with the product could scare them off, but will try it out!
I'm gradually learning and will work on making my marketing more user focussed. This image really sums it up and sticks in your head: http://www.useronboard.com/features-vs-benefits/
Thanks again, really awesome feedback!
EDIT: slight readability tweaks
[+] [-] sethjgore|10 years ago|reply
I'm a partner at http://green-bridge.org and we've been bootstrapping our stuff for a year now. It's a tool used for over 15 years in the classroom but we only just begun to bring business aspect to it. Grmmr shows visually the grammar of English (we're slowly expanding onto other languages). We're focused just on the grammar aspect of things.
You have exactly what we were planning on building. We would love to add our shapes atop of the translations so it's easier to visualize. A lot of schools and ESL groups in colleges use our tools and they definitely will benefit from using your stuff along with our visuals.
Let me know if this is something you might be interested in.
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
My TODO list is already way too long with core Readlang stuff to do this kind of integration at the moment, currently I don't even detect whether a word is a noun, verb, etc. It's all handled by google and the external dictionaries. I look forward to following your progress though. Good luck!
[+] [-] microcolonel|10 years ago|reply
That said, I'll take a look at this, maybe it's cool. :-)
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
It would be awesome to improve Japanese support later after it's achieved success with the main European languages.
[+] [-] remarkEon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaq|10 years ago|reply
Is the text user-generated?
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcoffland|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
But not all methods are equally effective so anything that reduces the time or effort required, even if just by 10%, is technically a 'short cut'. And anything that increases your enjoyment of the process is a win, regardless of whether it saves time, since it will help maintain motivation. Losing motivation is surely the most common reason people fail to learn.
The main idea here is to reduce the friction of reading as much as possible, freeing up your attention to focus on understanding and enjoying the text. The machine translation is only used here for words and short phrases, where it's more effective than for complete sentences.
(I'll take your word for it that google translate isn't so good with English-Chinese, I'm mainly focussed on the European languages for now)
[+] [-] tat45|10 years ago|reply
Neat idea though.
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imaginenore|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathansizz|10 years ago|reply
There's another extension (Language Immersion for Chrome) that could've been great - it's designed to be used during regular browsing in your own language, and translates a user-defined proportion of words from your language into your target language. Unfortunately, it only works for a few pages before being blocked.
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobo_mark|10 years ago|reply
How hard is it to get out and be social while literally everybody else is working at a 'real' job?
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: slight tweak
[+] [-] jrcii|10 years ago|reply
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ming-a-ling/
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aquarin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljk|10 years ago|reply
what do you mean by that?
[+] [-] abdulhaq|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsiefken|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostwriter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptownfunk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iagorodriguez|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveridout|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LiweiZ|10 years ago|reply