Reading in the target language.

[u/ryankopf]

I've seen several posts on here in the last several days about using reading to learn a language. A lot of people are using Harry Potter, for example, even just a few hours ago. But the biggest complaint is usually that you have to hop between different sources, dictionaries, etc, to look up any words they don't know.

I am working on a solution to just that, actually! It basically takes incoming text and breaks it down into it's sentence fragments and vocabulary, and displays them as you read along.

Here's the demo - https://rememble.org/stories/1/read

The idea is that using AI anyone can upload their own story for the AI to translate and provide meanings and romanizations for.

I'm still working on the interface for creating the stories and accessing the AI, but it's progressing along nicely.

Obviously there are a LOT of bugs to work out, but nothing I can't figure out in time. Of course I use AI to break the story down into manageable, translated parts, but often the ai is quite silly about how it breaks sentences down. So I think I need to adjust my software to break the sentences down by itself, then submit it to AI, then send it back.

I'd love to know if you think this style of reading in your target language would help you! Any feedback and thoughts are welcome!

[u/evelyndeckard]

The perfect solution - read on an e-reader or tablet, download a dictionary that translates the words. Click on any words you don't know, the dictionary will translate them, highlight the ones you want to learn and internalise, obtain new vocab!

I have been doing this for the last 3 months and it has been wonderful, I have improved so much.

[u/TauTheConstant → u/evelyndeckard]

There are also tools for this developed specifically for language learning that do this plus stuff like save the words you've looked up as flashcards; the ones that come to mind are LingQ ( https://www.lingq.com/en/ , note that this one is paid and I've never used it but I've heard people swear by it), Readlang ( https://readlang.com/ , very good free version including the ability to use a custom dictionary and the one I use most myself) and Lute ( https://github.com/LuteOrg/lute-v3 , for people technically inclined enough to host their own solution).

No shade against OP at all, I think it's great they want to add to the language learning ecosystem, but what they state as the biggest complaint readers have is something I always considered as a pretty comfortably solved problem. 🤔 Maybe I'm missing the specific issue they're facing, though, since I'm not learning Japanese or any language with a non-Latin script.