Cool extension. I will be trying this out, who knows maybe I will learn French. There should be an audio feature so I don't sound like an idiot when I try and speak.
@wangyoungchin Good point! Currently you can get audio pronunciation of individual words and phrases while practicing flashcards, and in the reader sidebar, but it should really be easily accessible while reading.
Note that people upload and sync YouTube videos with transcriptions which is a great way to get listening practice. Songs tend to be the most popular, here are few cool French ones:
Comme des enfants, Coeur de Pirate: http://readlang.com/library/527b...
Je Veux, Zaz: http://readlang.com/library/529b...
Elle Me Dit, Mika: http://readlang.com/library/528b...
Non, je ne regrette rien, Edith Piaf: http://readlang.com/library/5281...
You can find more of these by exploring the public French library: http://readlang.com/fr/library (select "Song" other filter if you like)
Very cool, I work on my Japanese by reading on a Kindle with a Japanese➤English dictionary installed.
Wish that their UI was as responsive as yours.
If you get this going from English➤Japanese (or other languages) you'd likely have a pretty big market with the international startup community. I know a lot of my friends in Japan are always wanting to read US tech news. Maybe that feature is already there though and I just missed it.
@benwtnb Actually, it is already possible. I don't speak Japanese myself but English ➤ Japanese should work well, assuming that Google Translate does a good job. The main difficulties are marketing and the lack of Japanese text throughout the UI - I'd definitely need some help from a native Japanese person to do this. I'm paying zero attention to localization at this point - pretty embarrassing for a language learning tool!
(Note that the other direction Japanese ➤ English doesn't work so well for two reasons: 1. I don't currently detect the word boundaries so the user needs to select these manually, and 2. There's no Furigana support which I'm told is important to learn pronunciation.)
@readlang Now I see the UI at the top for setting the language settings. Thanks!
Completely hear you on the Japanese text and lack of spaces being a pain. Trust me Japanese web designers and engineers still haven't completely figured out how to deal with this. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with it in a writing app I'm working on now, may have to ignore my home market at the beginning though…
I just posted my friend's startup Gengo on here today http://www.producthunt.com/posts... it could be a great way to get the UI elements for all languages done in one sweep, or at least be ready to add in more when the budget is available.
Probably most Japanese using your service would be able to navigate your UI, and most international users if they're attempting to read in English, but definitely feel more at home if it's in their native language. Will share with some friends today :)
Best of luck very cool what you're doing. I can't stand traditional text book language learning… one of my many weaknesses.
@readlang mentioned your site to a friend last night and he showed me his latest project, a news translation summary site. http://epitome.jp
He's translating the 5 most important points of major international tech stories and then linking to the English article. Part of his logic is that with the context of the major points it's easier to read the article in a foreign language.
Currently he's linking to the original article, and then a Google translate version. Know you're using GTranslate also, but it works on a word level fine, just not sentence level. Recommended he start using your service for his articles. Going to tweet you both now, to link you up, but did not want to try and fit all of this in 140 characters…
@benwtnb Thanks ben, that's a cool idea. I've thought about allowing users to contribute notes and summaries of texts on Readlang for the same reason.
It's true that Google Translate isn't perfect for whole sentences, and it's not always great for single words, I find it works best when you know some of the language so that you can decide which granularity to use it at - words or short phrases are usually optimal.
@readlang definitely, sorry think my comment came across wrong, but meant to say that the way you use it for the singular words when the native context is visible makes sense.
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