u/steveridout

Hi! Thanks for the suggestion. But Readlang really doesn't care how many words you practice every day. It used to way back in the early days, but I didn't like the feeling of overwhelm that I got by trying to keep every single word that I'd start practicing reinforced, so I changed it to leave it up to you how much you want to practice each day (assuming you have more vocab than time to master it, which is normally the case for users who do a reasonable mix of reading and practicing). I wrote about this here: https://blog.readlang.com/2013/08/09/spaced-repetition-version-2.html

Same for me! Super weird

Sorry for the late reply, just noticed this. I'm working on it full time for the moment. Who knows what the future holds but if there's any dramatic change in my situation I'll blog or post in the forum: https://forum.readlang.com/

Finding suitable content can be difficult. ChatGPT (paid version) can actually do a decent job at creating content that you're interested in at the beginner and intermediate levels. I've been posting some Spanish ones as "Readlang Story Bot" here: https://readlang.com/user/568c18e8e3fd54b963aaacb0/texts/es . At the more advanced level I like uploading whole novels, but I have to admit that I'm in the middle of one now and getting through it is slow going, next time I'll look for a novella.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that mobile apps would be cool. The problem is that I'm just one developer and there's already lots to work on on the web app. I'm worried that adding more platforms will leave me spread too thinly. Still, I do hope to create mobile apps one day. In the meantime one thing you can do is install the webapp to your homescreen to make it open in full screen mode: https://forum.readlang.com/t/install-readlang-on-your-iphone-ipad-or-android-home-screen/45

u/1031Bro I'm curious what you ended up doing? (I'm the other Steve, the one who runs Readlang)

I haven't used LingQ myself apart from some very brief poking around, so am interested in learning about how it compares with Readlang. One difference is that LingQ tracks all the words you know, whereas Readlang only tracks the words you have indicated that you weren't sure about and therefore may want to practice. Another difference I've learned recently is that with LingQ if you upgrade and then switch back to free you lose all your data! That doesn't seem great!

Hi! Readlang creator here. I'd love to know what you didn't like about Readlang.

Readlang creator here! Thanks for recommending it! If you add the Readlang web-app to your iOS homescreen which you can do via the share button it will open in full screen mode and feels pretty much like a proper app. (Probably similar on Android but don't have a device to test right now)

It's using GPT 3.5 at the moment. The cost increase going to 4 is huge, it's 30 times more expensive per output token.

That's very sensible! I think most long term users (myself included) collect too many words and phrases and then have a ridiculously large list. Your approach makes a lot more sense. Would be good if Readlang somehow encouraged this kind of pruning.

Thanks for your suggestions!

1. Good idea! Readlang should offer better ways to do this kind of pruning or batch reviewing of lots of vocab. Right now it gets unwieldy and demoralising seeing a massive list of words to review. (I have over 10,000 such words and phrases right now)
2. Interesting. I'll think about this.
3. Good to know. This could be an interesting addition to the smart definitions in the case where you use it for multi-word phrases: https://blog.readlang.com/2023/03/23/smart-definitions.html (these are ChatGPT powered though and I'm not yet sure how well they'll work for languages beyond EN, ES, FR, DE)

There is a uservoice forum where you can post ideas for improvements: https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general. I haven't yet become active on there since getting Readlang back since there have been so many other things to do, but I do look through the feedback every now and then.

1. True, I agree that tracking of progress could be better.
2. Great!
3. It's true that I'm using V2 of the Google Translate API right now, and there is a V3. I'm not completely sure about the differences though. One thing apart from the translation engine that may be more significant is that it's not taking into account the context around the specific word/phrase you clicked on. There is a way I could do this using OpenAI's models so I was thinking of playing around with that too. I do plan to improve the translations since that is the core feature of Readlang, and in doing that I'll certainly look into DeepL too (although it's a pity it doesn't support the number of languages that Readlang does).

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Thanks for your feedback!

That's great to hear! Thanks for sharing!

1. Interesting! Pages are with Readlang (or most e-readers) since the page number depends on your device, screen size and font, which you are able to switch while reading. One thing you could do is look in the address bar since the URL includes the word number at the end. For example on this text I'm currently on page 6966: https://readlang.com/library/56c5a1b571868511381b5660/from/6966. You could divide this number by 300 and use that as the page number in your tracking perhaps? (I'm also thinking about introducing some kind of "words read per day" metric somewhere in Readlang, since I think that it would be nice to set yourself a daily goal based on that. It's a little tricky though since Readlang will have to do a bit of educated guess-work to figure out when you're actually reading vs just skimming quickly while looking for something)
2. The URL changes with each page that you are on, so you could use your browser's bookmarks feature to keep track of a specific point in the text. Readlang should remember where you are (the first word on the page) and when you open the same book again it should pick up from where you left off. There's also a button at the bottom of the page which looks a bit like "▶|" which takes you to furthest word through the text of all the words you have ever seen within that text. Let me know if that seems sufficient or if you still think a bookmark feature within Readlang would be useful for you.

Oh, that's interesting!

I had a quick look and although useful for beginners they're not that entertaining as stories, especially compared to the Duolingo ones. Then again the fact that they are public domain is great!

This is a great idea! I agree that content for beginners is a big missing piece at the moment so I'm going to give serious thought to this.

Thanks for the warning. I agree that it's imperfect but in my opinion it's pretty impressive what this technology can do and it's fun to experiment with. If I make it clear the definitions are generated by AI then users can set their expectations accordingly.

Oh, and this is an optional feature, you can turn it off via the settings page.

When you think about it, all of the translations on Readlang are from machine translation, which is a more limited kind of AI.

I totally agree that the Web Reader on mobile is awkward to install and use. This is one of the things I'd hope to remedy if I ever get around to creating an iOS app.

That said... when you use the Web Reader bookmarklet on mobile, it should add a little green arrow to the right of every link. You can then click on the text of the link to translate it or the green arrow if you want to follow the link. I accept that this isn't totally obvious! Does this work for you?

Thanks for the suggestion! This has come up before. I'm open to the idea but the problem is the number of languages Readlang supports could make it tricky. I would need to find a solution that didn't require much extra work per language.

Also, the way I think it would work is that the word would still be stored in its conjugated form since it needs to match the attached context sentence for use in the cloze deletion flashcards. It would be nice to show the infinitive alongside the conjugated form somewhere in the UI though. Were you thinking something like this?

I love the idea of mini-stories. Having a library of high quality mini stories a bit like the ones on Duolingo would be a great addition to Readlang for beginners.

Lmao just bought LingQ lifetime because of Readlang stopping development. Oh well it’s a fantastic program too

What's their cancellation policy? :-P

(jk, actually I think using a variety of different tools is the way to go!)

Thanks!

Readlang actually supports up to 12 word phrases :-)

But it doesn't support definitions, only translations. I'm going to give more thought to learning via a mixture of definitions and translations.

As for content... I agree that that's a weak spot of Readlang. Bring your own content can work for more advanced learners but for beginners it adds a lot of friction. A high quality beginner's content library would be awesome. Do you know where LingQ gets its beginner content from?

LingQ has a lot more features beyond the audio reader, but they tend to be half baked. LingQ has much better stat tracking capabilities.

I'm curious, having not tried LingQ apart from a very brief look almost 10 years ago, what do you think it does better than Readlang? What makes it better for beginners? Do they have good content for beginners?

I have some ideas but not a fixed plan. Here's what I'm currently thinking:

- Make it easier to build a daily habit. Duolingo does this really well. A stronger streak mechanic encouraging you to meet daily reading and/or flashcard goals. Currently the reading goal is based on number of translations which was done because it was easy to implement but I think number of words read would be better. And make your streak more visible throughout the app to make it something that you feel more invested in.

- Streamline the design and UX. It's a bit sloppy at the moment. Then again, I may take the opportunity to start from a clean slate with an iOS app in a few months time.

- Improve the translations. Right now they don't take the context around the word/phrase you highlight into account. There are ways to do this with new AI tech that I may play with.

- Consider a way to cut down on the number of words. An option to only translate without adding to word list is a long requested feature. I've always hesitated since I wanted the reading experience to be distraction free and felt that you shouldn't be using your valuable attention to manage your word list. Still on the fence about this but I think there should be a better way to remove the less useful words

- Improve the flashcards experience. Make it more fun and useful. Think about a good way to ensure you're actually learning the right thing! Sometimes the translations aren't perfect given the context and you should edit them but it's not clear how many people do a good job at this, so think of ways to make it easier.

- Try to make the Chrome extension work without needing third party cookies enabled.

- There's also a lot of behind the scenes work I'm doing and will need to do to upgrade some of the technology and clean up the code base.

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Just recently, I couldn't resist playing with ChatGPT and yesterday I released an experimental feature only visible to paying subscribers learning English, Spanish or French which puts an AI-generated custom definition in your learning language in the sidebar when reading texts within readlang.com. Just an experiment for now and I need to see if people find it useful. I think it's pretty cool, especially for more advanced learners.

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There's a ton I could do and TBH it's hard to prioritise. I obviously take user feedback into account so if you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Hi! Steve here, creator of Readlang. Cool to see my blog post shared here. AMA

I attended this school: https://laemadrid.com/course/year-long-academic-spanish-program/.

In my case I only did 2.5 weeks of a semi-intensive course and enjoyed it. I didn't need a visa personally, but I know that they did help other students to get one.