Readlang Blog

Better voices in Readlang

2026-05-25T00:00:00+02:00

Readlang now has a new set of high quality voices you can choose from for both Auto-Translate (previously Speaking Mode) feature, as well as for speaking whole texts with Read Aloud.

Previously, the voice used when you tap a word (Speaking Mode) and the voice used when you press play on the Read Aloud bar were two completely separate systems. The tap-a-word voice came from a paid Microsoft Azure service. The Read Aloud voice came from whatever your browser had installed. They had different settings, different speed controls, and there was no way to pick which voice to use.

Now there’s a single voice picker for each language, with all the available voices listed in one place:

You can change it at any time from the reader page sidebar, under Settings. There are two pickers so you can choose a different voice for the two features:

Auto-Pronounce is used when you tap a word or phrase, when Ami speaks a chat message, and during flashcard practice.
Read Aloud is used when you press play to listen to the whole text.

The voice and speed you pick are saved per language, so picking Mattias once for Swedish means you’ll keep hearing Mattias on every Swedish text, flashcard and chat from now on.

For some languages you can also pick the regional accent you want. Spanish has voices for both Spain and Mexico, and Portuguese has voices for both Portugal and Brazil:

(English has separate voices for US, UK and Australia, and Chinese has both Mainland and Taiwan.)

What’s available on each plan:

Free: browser voices only (whatever your device has installed).
Premium: high quality Readlang voices for Auto-Pronounce. Browser voices for Read Aloud.
Premium Plus: high quality Readlang voices for both Auto-Pronounce and Read Aloud.

The high quality voices are generated on Readlang’s server using the Microsoft Azure neural voice service. This is the same service that has powered the tap-a-word voice and the flashcard practice voice for years, but now available with a choice of specific voice and for whole-text Read Aloud too. Because the audio is generated on the server, the voices sound identical on every device you use, and they’re not affected by which browser or OS you’re on.

If you’d rather not upgrade for this, it’s worth knowing that Microsoft also ship these same voices for free inside the Microsoft Edge browser, so if you use Edge on desktop or Android, you’ll see them in the Read Aloud picker under “Browser voices”. (Unfortunately this isn’t the case for MS Edge on iOS, so this won’t work on iPhones or iPads.)

This was a pretty large rewrite under the hood so please let me know if you spot any problems, whether that’s a voice not playing, the wrong voice being used, the picker not appearing, or anything else weird.

Discuss this post on the Readlang Forum.

Three new ways to make learning with Readlang more enjoyable

2024-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

I have three very exciting features to present to you, the first of which is a big upgrade to Readlang’s oldest and most central feature, click to translate.

1: Context-Aware Translations

From the start, the core of Readlang has been its reading interface, allowing you to click on words or drag across phrases for quick translations. This generally works pretty well, but there are times–when words have multiple meanings or when a word is particularly obscure–when the old translation method would fall short. If you suspected that the translation wasn’t accurate you could expand your selection to include more context around it, and use the Explain or Dictionary tabs for extra help. This is a great combo of tools, but now with the advances in AI, we can do even better!

If you are a Premium^* subscriber you now get Context-Aware Translations, so when you click on a word or phrase, Readlang will show you a translation which takes into account the whole context sentence around it, for a far more accurate translation. To illustrate this, let’s first look at an example of the old Google Translate based system:

The the above case the first translation is good, the second is fine but perhaps a bit unnatural sounding, and the third is not quite correct. Below you can see the exact same words translated with the new Context-Aware Translations, in which “dawning” and “hoist myself” are more appropriate given the context:

For particularly obscure words or for less common languages, the new system can still very occasionally give a bad translation due to the limitations of the GPT-4o mini model being used. To get the very best translations you can upgrade to the Premium Plus^* plan which uses the state-of-the-art GPT-4o model.

2: Audio Upload & AI Transcription

This is another biggie! People have been asking for this almost since Readlang started, and now it’s here. You can now upload mp3 files up to 200MB and 2 hours in length each. Enough for most podcasts or chunks of audio books, and will help you sharpen your listening skills in whichever language you are learning. The really cool thing about this feature is that it will use AI to automatically transcribe the audio, providing a synchronized transcription that will highlight each word as it’s being spoken. A huge help for keeping track of where you are in the conversation!

Upload your mp3s from the same place you would texts and epubs: the upload page.

Premium^* users can store 5 hours worth of medium quality audio (mono 64kbps).

Premium Plus^* users can store 100 hours worth of higher quality audio (stereo 128kbps).

3: Readlang Story Bot

One of the main challenges to reading in a foreign language is finding content that is both appropriate for your level and interesting to you. This is where the Readlang Story Bot (powered by the full GPT-4o model) can help! Click the Generate Story button from the library page to get started.

You can choose between Classic Fiction, Non-Fiction, Biography and Original Fiction, enter whatever text you like as the topic or name of the story and texts can be up to 1000 words long.

In the following example I’ve selected Biography and entered “Salvador Dali” as the person, and within less than a minute it generated this:

Check out the result for yourself here: Salvador Dalí: Vida y Obra del Maestro del Surrealismo

Story Bot is available to all Premium^* and Premium Plus^* users. Create stories for yourself at Readlang Story Bot.

* Premium is $6 / month or $48 / year. Premium Plus is $15 / month or $120 / year.

Discuss this post on the Readlang Forum. You can also visit the forum to offer suggestions, report bugs, and for more frequent updates compared to the blog.

58 New Languages Just Landed! All with Explain Support!

2024-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

This is a great day if you happen to be learning one of the 58 languages listed below, many of which are quite obscure and not well served by language learning apps. Readlang has added support for all of them, bringing total supported languages to 119, and what’s more all languages now come with Readlang’s Explain feature.

What does this mean?

If you’re learning any of these languages you now have a web-app allowing you to read and study using Readlang’s suite of learning tools:

A clean, distraction free reading interface
Ability to upload texts including entire novels
Comprehension aids including translation glosses shown above words or phrases which you click on in the text, and an English AI generated explanation in of what it means in context:

Different practice methods for you to reinforce the new vocabulary you have encountered:

A Chrome extension to read and import target language articles you find online

Here’s the list of languages which have just been added to Readlang:

Tatar, Albanian, Uzbek, Yoruba, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Amharic, Assamese, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Bambara, Corsican, Dhivehi, Ewe, Frisian, Guarani, Gujarati, Hausa, Igbo, Kannada, Kinyarwanda, Kurdish, Lao, Lingala, Luganda, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Marathi, Nepali, Oromo, Pashto, Punjabi, Quechua, Samoan, Sanskrit, Sesotho, Shona, Sindhi, Somali, Sundanese, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya, Tsonga, Turkmen, Uyghur, Xhosa, Zulu, Javanese, Nyanja / Chichewa, Odia / Oriya, Scots Gaelic, Sinhala / Sinhalese, Twi / Akan

That’s on top of the other 61 languages which Readlang already supported!

Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

Discuss this post on the Readlang Forum

Review Summaries

2024-05-22T00:00:00+02:00

Do you ever find yourself drifting off within a story and wondering what just happened? Like “wait… did John die?… he just sleeping?… what exactly is going on here!?” Well, Readlang now has a handy feature for you: Review Summaries! These are short summaries sprinkled throughout the text so that if ever feel lost, you can check you’re at least getting the gist and not missing some important plot point.

You’ll see green divider lines like this every 300-ish words:

And when you click on the “?” icon you’ll see a summary like this generated by ChatGPT:

By default they are shown in English, but if you’re feeling confident and want a more immersive experience, you can click the link at the bottom to switch them to the language you’re learning.

These are currently available only for premium subscribers in supported languages *. To enable and disable the feature, open the reader sidebar and look for the Review Summary Buttons option which you can set to “Show”:

Let me know what you think!

* Supported languages: Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish

Introducing Read-Aloud

2023-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

I’m excited to introduce a new feature: you can now listen to entire texts uploaded to Readlang with synchronzied word highlighting! This uses your browser’s built-in text-to-speech functionality so which languages are supported will depend upon your device and browser.

If your browser supports it, you will now see a Play/Pause button at the bottom of the reader page, and when you click it, you’ll hear a voice speaking the whole text, with the current word highlighted:

It’s similar to the existing highlighting that Readlang supports for YouTube video transcriptions but with the benefit that you don’t need to manually synchronize the text to the audio.

While these aren’t real human voices, the upside is that you can easily access it on any text you upload. Plus, over time I expect that over time higher quality voices will become available which sound even more natural.

Customization

You can customize the voice and speed. You’ll find these options in the Settings tab of the reader sidebar.

Would love to hear what you think! Please give it a try and let me know! (This is new so if you find bugs or things which don’t work so well, I’m particularly interested in that.)

If you find that you don’t enjoy the voices available on your current browser, I recommend trying out MS Edge on any OS apart from iOS since it has some fantastic voices available for a lot of different languages. (Unfortunately iOS restricts third party browser apps a lot so they end up all having to use the same underlying engine and all share the same set of voices.)

UPDATE 18 June 2024: All users can now switch between all voices and speeds available within your browser. This is no longer restricted to premium subscribers.

UPDATE 25 May 2026: Read Aloud can still use your browser’s built-in voices, but Premium Plus now also includes high quality Readlang-generated voices for speaking whole texts. These voices are generated by Readlang using MS Azure, which offers a lot of the same voices available on MS Edge for free, but in a way which is consistent across your devices.

Improvements to the reading interface

2023-07-04T00:00:00+02:00

This is a small update, but it addresses a couple of things which have bugged me about Readlang’s reading interface for a while.

Before, the page navigation UI felt clunky to me:

Now, it looks like this:

The difference may seem subtle, but it changes these three things:

The “jump to furthest read” button used to be right next to the “next page” button. You had to be careful to make sure you were tapping the right one, particularly on mobile. In the new version, the next page button has a larger hit area and is easy to tap without fear of accidentally hitting the “jump to furthest read” button, which is now accessible by tapping on the progress percentage.
The arrows in the margins were there to indicate that you can tap the side of the page to navigate. Although informative, having so many arrows on the page made it feel cluttered. In the new version you can still tap on the margins to change page but the extra arrows are no longer shown.
For shorter texts, the percentage is now just a single number instead of a range, which I think looks cleaner. One of the goals of this reading interface is to be distraction free.

The “go to start” and “go to furthest read” options now accessible by clicking on the percentage at the bottom, which will show the following popup:

Extra context

I’ve finally fixed a long standing bug where the context before the start of the page wasn’t included with your saved words. For example, if you translated the first word in the screenshot above, the context before this fix would only contain “muerta en el acto.”, discarding the first part of the sentence. Since the recent fix, it will now include the full sentence “La princesa se herirá con un huso al cumplir los quince años y quedará muerta en el acto.” Sorry this fix took so long!

Sub-headings now appear in the title bar

Previously, for long texts containing main headings and sub-headings (e.g. for parts and chapters), only the main headings would be selected in the title-bar dropdown, meaning that you couldn’t easily tell which sub-section you were currently reading. Now sub-headings will be selected too.

That’s it for now

These are small changes, but I hope they make your experience with Readlang more enjoyable! Let me know in the comments if you have any feedback!

Context-Aware Explanations (Smart Definitions V2)

2023-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

It’s been 3 months since I added Context-Aware Explanations (previously known as Smart Definitions) to Readlang. I’ve had great feedback about this feature so far! Here’s a small sample:

“I’m really loving the new feature Smart definitions! It does a much better job than dictionaries because there’s a lot of things dictionaries can’t translate well, and Smart definitions uses context and explains it in a comprehensible way.”
“I just wanted to say that I’ve really come to love the AI “define” feature you’ve added! Especially since it defines the word in the language one is learning. I honestly didn’t think I’d use it much at first, but I’ve found it very useful especially for when a word’s meaning in context isn’t obvious from the translation alone.”
“I was pleasantly astonished one day, while reading a book in German, to see an AI-definition pop up. I particularly appreciate the quality of the AI-generated definitions/translations. Of course, it’s not at all infallible, but it still feels, at times, like you’re in a conversation with a native speaker about a given word or phrase.”
“I have been using the AI and love it. I really like the way it delves further into the meaning of sentences. Wow! mind blown! I feel it’s like having a tutor by your side.”

You can access it from the reader page by opening the sidebar in a supported language. Here’s how it looks:

At first this was only available for premium subscribers, but now even free users get access to 10 of these explanations per day. It’s also available in more languages. Here’s the full list of supported languages:

Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Icelandic
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latin
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Serbian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian

For most of these languages, I’m not in a position to judge the accuracy of the explanations. If you have any feedback, please let me know!

The Key To Learning Anything

2023-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

If you want to learn or make progress on something, then turning it into a daily habit is about the most powerful way to do that. Much has been written on this topic, but the one that stuck for me is The Seinfeld Strategy: “Your only job is to not break the chain”.

Readlang has had a streak feature for the past few years, but two things bugged me about it:

It wasn’t very visible, so it wasn’t obvious when I’d achieved your goal, and because it wasn’t that prominently displayed, it wasn’t something I cared about that much.
The reading component of the old daily goal was based on the number of words you’d translated. I didn’t like that it was based on the number of words you translated rather than the number of words you actually read.

This changed a few weeks ago with the new streak feature which, if you’re a regular Readlang user, you’ll probably have noticed already! Here’s how it works:

At the top right of the page you’ll notice a flame icon with a number next to it:

In the above case, the number 10 means that you have a 10 day streak. The faded flame means that you haven’t yet met your daily goal. And the circle filling up around the flame represents your progress towards reaching today’s goal. The circle fills up as you read and practice, and once it’s full, the flame will appear brighter and the number will increase by 1 extra day.

Importantly, this is even shown within the reader page, so that you can tell as soon as you’ve reached your minimum reading goal for the day:

The goal is to read 500 words or to practice 10 words, or some combination of the two, every day. The idea of this goal is to be easy to achieve every single day to encourage you to show up every day. I realize many learners will want to go beyond this, but whether you want to study intensely or casually there is huge value in the habit of just showing up and that’s what the daily streak is all about. It’s a small but meaningful amount of practice that should feel easy to accomplish even on busy days.

So get started on that streak! Don’t break the chain!

Delete Flashcards While Reading

2023-06-09T00:00:00+02:00

For a long time, learners on Readlang have been asking for an easy way to control which words get converted into flashcards and now it finally exists!

You can now enable “delete on deselect” in which words and phrases will be deleted from your account simply by clicking an extra time to hide them.

Click to open the sidebar
Click On Deselect Word/Phrase -> Delete Flashcard
Now, whenever you click on a translated word or phrase, you’ll see the translation get crossed out briefly before it disappears. At this point the word will be in your “Deleted” folder.

You can also change this setting directly from the Web Reader by from within its dropdown menu.

Let me know what you think! I might even make this the standard behavior going forward, so I’m particularly interested to know if anyone doesn’t like this mode.

Smart Definitions

2023-03-23T00:00:00+01:00

Using an external dictionary in the Readlang sidebar is very useful for those times when the simple translation doesn’t quite cut it. But the quality of the different external dictionaries varies a lot, some of them have stopped working within Readlang, and the problem with all of them is that they aren’t aware of the context around the word or phrase you’re translating.

Enter the experimental “Smart Definitions” feature. This adds a new “Define” tab in the sidebar that gives you an AI generated definition of any word or phrase you click on. The incredible thing is that it’s aware of the entire sentence and takes that context into consideration. It works like magic! (Actually, behind the scenes, it’s using ChatGPT)

This works very well with Readlang’s monolingual mode. You may even find it useful for reading very difficult texts in your first language!

Right now it’s only available to paid subscribers reading texts in English, French and Spanish. There’s no reason I can’t also bring it to other widely spoken languages too, but that’ll depend on whether people find it useful. (Unfortunately less widely spoken languages won’t work so well.)

If you give it a try, please let me know what you think!

UPDATE (25th March 2023): Just added German support!

UPDATE (8th June 2023): The tab has now been renamed from Define to Explain and the feature is called Context-Aware Explanations. It’s now available in German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

UPDATE (27th June 2023): Read the new blog post for more updates on this feature, which is now called Explain and supports even more languages.

Readlang Is Back!

2023-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

Wait? Readlang is back? Where did it go? Well, in one sense it never went anywhere, it’s been helping people learn languages by reading since 2013. But in 2016 I went to work at Duolingo (read more), and in 2017 I sold Readlang to them. I really enjoyed my time at Duolingo and worked on some cool stuff there including Duolingo Stories, but unfortunately Readlang stagnated. Luckily for you and I, the good people at Duolingo have sold Readlang back to me!

What are my plans? In the short term there are essential maintenance tasks to ensure Readlang keeps running. In the medium term I’ll be making improvements to the website and Chrome extension. (Have a suggestion? Please add or vote for it on the feedback forum or add a comment below.) Longer term I’d love to create a Readlang iOS app.

Readlang was developed in the 3.5 years from Nov 2012 to Mar 2016. I’m hesitant to promise too much since who knows what the future holds, but now that I’m back, I’m excited to see what it’ll look like in another 3.5 years!

The Readlang Method for Learning Vocab

2016-01-21T00:00:00+01:00

I found vocabulary to be the most intimidating part of learning a foreign language. I’m an engineer at heart, more at home with math & physics, where you learn a small amount of things, from which everything else can be derived.

The other aspects of Spanish such as pronunciation and grammar seemed to offer a set of rules which could be learned, practiced and internalized given a reasonable amount of studying. (I particularly like Michel Thomas and Duolingo for this.) But I had no handle on how to learn vocabulary. I’ve never been a fan of rote learning, and hence never developed skills to learn vast quantities of unrelated things. It seems to take somewhere in the order of 10,000 words to read comfortably in a foreign language. It may as well have been infinite. How on earth do you approach learning 10,000 of anything?

Where to start

Word usage falls very rapidly from top ones like “the” to common ones like “house” and then to more esoteric ones like “esoteric” (see Zipf’s law). You’ll often hear statements like “the top 1000 words cover 80% of all texts”. This is motivating, but once you’ve learned the top 1000 words and realize how little you understand, you get jaded and realize that it’s those 20% of rarer words that carry the most meaning. But given you never know which rarer words you may need, it clearly makes sense to focus on learning the most frequent ones first.

We could download a list of the most frequent words with translations and start memorizing. But that would be a bad idea because:

An isolated word often has no direct translation, and needs to be surrounded by other words to carry meaning.
Your ultimate goal isn’t to know X words, it’s to be able to string them together to express ideas and thoughts in sentences and conversation.
We remember things better when they form connections with other memories or concepts. You’ll remember words more effectively when they are used in an interesting or emotionally charged context.
The top 1,000 words from one particular list may not be the ideal 1,000 words for you to learn. A backpacker will need a different set than a businessman.
A list this long is too intimidating to memorize without a good strategy.

Luckily, there’s a solution… Read interesting content relevant to you. This appears to fix all these problems. You will encounter the most useful words more frequently, and they will be charged with interesting contexts and meaning. But reading is difficult without the necessary vocabulary. Catch 22.

How to read

Since reading seems like an effective way to improve vocabulary, but is too difficult, we should make it easier.

What makes reading difficult? Given enough time and a good dictionary, you can normally figure out the meaning of what you’re reading. The real difficulty comes from the slow-down and distraction that this causes.

When reading in your native language you can inhabit the world of the text and focus completely on the characters, descriptions and ideas within. If you start to think about anything else, it can break the spell. Your eyes continue scanning the words, but your mind is elsewhere. If this happens in your first language, imagine how easily it can in another language where you are always distracted by the need to decipher new words and phrases.

If you are more interested in reading purely as a language learning study method, this may not bother you too much. You can lose your way in the story and still pick up a lot of the language. But enjoying what you read is much better. Not only because you are likely to keep doing it longer, but because the ideas and characters and emotions of the story will form connections that help cement the new vocabulary in your memory. So it’s important that reading should be as fast and distraction free as possible so that you can actually enjoy it.

This is where technology comes to the rescue. All ebook readers have built in dictionaries these days. These are less distracting and hence preferable to paper dictionaries. But they often involve multiple clicks, button presses or short delays. This is because they aren’t built solely for language learners, and translations aren’t their main feature. If you want an e-reader designed for language learners, you should try Readlang, where one tap on a word, or one swipe across a phrase, offers an immediate translation. This is frictionless, and a great ally in the battle to stay focused on the story.

While you’re enjoying the story, some magic happens behind the scenes. Every translation is stored, along with its context, for you to drill later.

How to drill vocabulary

Some people don’t like flashcards or other rote drilling methods, and that’s fine, you can get by without them. But for people who want to give their vocabulary a boost with minimal study time, there’s a tool that many expert language learners swear by…

Spaced repetition is an effective way to memorize a large quantity of things, and is very suited for learning vocabulary. It’s a long term approach. But it aims to reduce the total time spent studying by scheduling repeat exposure to a word at longer and longer intervals.

I normally prefer more creative methods of practicing, but I’ve come to appreciate the ease and effectiveness of daily spaced repetition flashcards when it comes to vocabulary.

Here’s how a practice session with Readlang looks.

A small deck of the most frequently used words is pulled from your translation history.
You work through the small deck one by one. Each card starts in passive mode. You see the target language word within its context sentence, and you need to guess its meaning in your first language. If you guess correctly, it flips over to active mode. The card is then reinserted back into the deck so and will appear again shortly.
If the card has been flipped to active mode, you see the word’s context as a cloze sentence, plus the translation. You need to guess the original word or phrase. This is more difficult than passive mode. Once you do this successfully, you’ve finished that card for the day and it’s removed from the session deck. If you came close to remembering, the card is placed back in the deck in active mode. If you completely failed, the card is placed back in the deck in passive mode.
Once you’ve finished the deck, you are shown when each word is scheduled for studying next. Those words will not be shown in any practice sessions until that date, allowing you to learn different words in the meantime.

If you use this system daily, it will allow to learn a huge amount useful vocabulary in a systematic and engaging way.

Here are the key ways it optimizes your vocabulary learning:

Focuses only on words and phrases that are relevant to you, since you encountered them while reading.
Prioritizes the most useful words in the language based on word frequency lists.
Schedules your learning with spaced repetition, repeating words you find the most difficult more often.
Displays the context sentence to provide more meaning, jog your memory, and aid retention.

There are other flashcard apps available, and if you have another favorite, you can export words and their context sentences, using Readlang just for reading and collecting vocab. See this tutorial on exporting from Readlang to Anki.

TL;DR

Learning vocabulary is intimidating. The combination of reading, collecting new vocab, and reviewing with spaced repetition flashcards is a good approach.

An Instapaper For Language Learners

2015-12-10T00:00:00+01:00

Readlang was originally designed for reading novels, but it was clear early on that I needed a more accessible source of free content for people to read, and what better source than the internet! For this reason, Readlang has a web importer, allowing you to import a plain text version of a web-page, a la Instapaper*. The original importer was a hastily coded affair, which included far too much cruft from the source web page and has long been due for an overhaul, so here it is…

Web Importer 2.0

Readlang’s homebrew importer has been ditched in favor of the same readability algorithm which powers the Firefox Reader View **.

See the difference it makes here:

As you can see, there’s far less cruft now. Also, some of the original formatting is retained, including headings, bold and italic.

(One thing still missing is images - let me know if this is important to you!)

Using the Web Importer

There are three ways to use the web importer:

Install the Web Reader Chrome Extension, right click any web page and select “Import to Readlang”.
Open the Web Reader within your chosen webpage, open its drop-down menu, and select “Import to Readlang”.
Save the Web Importer bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks, browse to a web page you’d like to read, and click the bookmarklet link.

These new additions should make the Web Importer far more pleasant to use. Give it a try let me know what you think!

* At the time of starting work on Readlang, I was devouring Marco Arment’s Build and Analyze podcast, where he talked about the making of Instapaper. This inspired the creation of Readlang’s Web Importer bookmarklet.

** Thanks to Mozilla for their open source Readability library, and to arc90labs, on whose original Readability script it was based.

Introducing Shelves

2015-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

This one’s a biggie, and has taken a while to implement.

Earlier this year I added some improvements to My Texts. But after receiving feedback from some of the most prolific sharers of content on Readlang, it was clear that more organization was required.

My Texts

Here’s the new My Texts page:

Browsing

Select the section to browse:

To Read (renamed from Reading Queue): Texts that you plan to read or are currently reading.
Completed: Feel proud as this fills with completed texts.
Archived (renamed from Abandoned): Texts you want to keep, but don’t plan on reading soon.
Shared: All texts you shared publicly.
Shelves: Each new shelf you create will be listed here.
Deleted: Similar Recycle Bin or Trash, any text you delete will be moved here giving you a chance to recover it. Browse deleted texts to permanently delete or recover texts.

Searching

You’ll notice that there’s now a search box on the right allowing you to quickly locate texts based on their title or the author name.

Arranging Texts on Shelves

Select some of your texts by clicking on the checkboxes at the left of each table row, and then click the Arrange on shelves… button to see the following controls:

These allows you to add new shelves, and to add and remove selected texts from shelves.

Other Actions

Select some texts and click Actions to alter their read status, share them, or delete them.

Edit a Shelf

Browse to a specific shelf and you’ll see the shelf editing interface:

Re-Arrange Shelves

You can click on the title or description to edit them. And you can use the handles to the left of each text to re-arrange them:

Click on the Share Publicly checkbox to share this shelf, along with all its associated texts.

Once public, you can share the Shareable Link allowing others to open the public view of that shelf.

(For now these shelves aren’t listed anywhere on Readlang, but you can share the link however you like. After enough shelves have been shared, I’ll think about adding a public listing of shared shelves.)

I hope you enjoy these new features. As always, please let me know if you have any feedback.

Happy language learning!

PS: Only Premium users can create shelves. This was an easy decision for private shelves since only heavy users will require them for organization. Public shelves may become free in future, but I’m restricting them to paying users for now since it will greatly reduce the risk of people posting spam in the shelf descriptions.

Spanish Immersion Homepage - Chrome Extension

2015-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Have you ever felt that Chrome’s new tab page is a massive productivity sink? It tempts you with your most visited pages. Facebook, Gmail, Reddit – procrastination central. It wastes your time with watching innane viral videos and derails your train of thought. This extension takes over the new tab page to encourage browsing the web in Spanish. If you’re going to be distracted, don’t fight it, use it to your advantage!

Get the Spanish Immersion Homepage extension on the Chrome Web Store

It’s very simple, and contains:

a google search box, but configured to return Spanish language results.
links to Spanish websites you’d like to visit regularly. It’s editable – so fill it with your favorite sites.

This was inspired by the excellent Momentum extension.

Useful? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Keep your books, articles and videos organized

2015-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

If you read a lot, you’ll appreciate the need to keep your language learning library in order. Readlang helps you by organizing your texts and videos into the following categories:

Reading queue Texts you are currently reading, or waiting to read.
Completed texts Celebrate your victories! Browse through this list and feel pround of what you’ve accomplished. The great part is, if you choose an old text to re-read, it will remind you how far you’ve progressed, as you breeze though a text you were previously struggling with.
Abandoned texts Like Trash on Mac, or Recycle Bin on Windows, Abandoned texts will stay here until you decide to clear them out. I encourage you to abandon texts that are too difficult and move on to something more enjoyable. If you’re anything like me it’ll be hard to admit defeat, but often finding an easier, more interesting, or more enjoyable text will motivate you to learn faster.
Shared texts All texts you shared publicly with the Readlang community will be listed here.

I hope you enjoy these features. If you have any comments or suggestions please make use of the Feedback Forum

Remember that building regular habits is the key to successful learning, so keep reading and practicing a little every day!

PS: This was launched back in June, but I was so busy working on other features I forgot to announce them on the blog. Oh well, better late than never!

Speaking mode / Auto-Pronounce

2015-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

Speaking and listening skills are an extremely important for learning a language. Readlang already has plenty of YouTube videos for you to practice listening. Songs have proved to be a favorite:

To complement this, you can now enable Speaking Mode. This provides automatic text-to-speech when you click a word or phrase in any text, and when reviewing your flashcards, Readlang will pronounce the word or phrase as it is revealed.

Enable speaking mode via the Settings page:

These features are available to Readlang Premium subscribers only. Go Premium for only $6/month or $48/year.

UPDATE 25 May 2026: Speaking Mode is now called Auto-Pronounce. It still refers to automatic pronunciation of words and phrases you click while reading, plus flashcard and Ami pronunciation. Availability and voice quality have changed since this post was written. Auto-Pronounce may use device voices or high quality Readlang-generated voices depending on your plan, language, and device. Read Aloud is the separate feature for speaking whole texts.

It works on readlang.com and the Readlang Web Reader on desktop and Android Chrome. On iOS it only works on readlang.com.

To translate or not? Monolingual mode arrives

2015-09-30T00:00:00+02:00

There are few topics more divisive among language learners than the question of translation. Is translating a bad habit? Should learners stop as soon as possible? Whatever your opinion, Readlang can now help.

From today, you can disable translations and access monolingual definitions.

Translations On (default)

This is the way Readlang is typically used - unobtrusive translations are provided in the text itself, with the option of extra translations in the sidebar dictionary.

Translations Off (monolingual option for advanced learners)

To turn off translations and go monolingual, click on the little arrow so that it turns to a cross. The box representing your first language will be greyed out and the sidebar dictionary will show definitions in the language you are learning:

In the background, Readlang will still translate these words in order to prepare flashcards for you to review later.

Customizing your monolingual dictionaries

You can now define two different custom dictionaries for each language that you are studying, a monolingual one and a bilingual one. Many of the languages have pre-defined dictionaries, for other suggestions see a guide to online dictionaries on Fluent in 3 Months.

Add your own favorite monolingual or bilingual dictionary from the settings page:

Web Reader

The monolingual mode works within the Web Reader just the same way - click the little arrow in the Web Reader toolbar to toggle between translation and monolingual mode. The monolingual definitions will be displayed in an external pop-up window. (On some browsers the pop-up may not appear at first, in this case, click Menu -> Open Dictionary to see it, it will then update on each subsequent lookup.)

Give it a try

The translation mode is still the main attraction of Readlang, with the new monolingual mode as an alternative when you feel like more of a challenge. So which is more effective - to translate or not to translate? Try both ways and decide for yourself.

Please leave feedback in the comments below.

New Activity Monitor to encourage a daily language learning habit

2015-09-10T00:00:00+02:00

The main reason people fail at learning a language is not showing up to practice every day. Effective language learners manage to incorporate the language into their lives on a regular basis, they form daily habits. Having a job where you must speak the language is ideal, but most of us need to find other ways to squeeze practice into our busy lives.

Here’s a tip: Avoid the temptation to set a very ambitious goal when it comes to daily practice. Try to set a small, manageable goal that you can accomplish even on your busiest days. When you have more time, that’s fine, hunker down for an extended study session. I would aim for a minimum goal that takes under 10 mins, that you can easily manage every day. You wouldn’t dream of not brushing your teeth, no matter how busy the day, and you should feed the same way about this goal. It’s the trick that Jerry Seinfeld uses, he commits to write at least one joke every day and never breaks the chain.

To keep things simple, I’ve chosen a daily goal for you: 10 translations or recalls per day with Readlang. This means you can:

Read enough content to encounter 10 unknown words or phrases that you need help understanding.
Try to recall 10 words or phrases using the flashcards.
Any combination of the above.

You can keep track of your goal on the new Activity Monitor on the Readlang homepage:

Keep up this goal for many days in a row and watch your streak count increase. Remember that small sessions every day are more effective than occasional cramming. If you’re serious about learning your chosen language, cultivating a daily habit is the single most important thing you can do.

Leave feedback below, and please don’t hold back, constructive criticism is welcome!

Note: Words read may be a better metric than words translated, and it would be motivating to watch your rate increase as your skill improves. The problem is it’s hard for Readlang to know for sure how much of a page you actually read, especially when reading web-pages with the Web Reader.

Turn your favorite novel into a motivating and effective language learning tool

2015-07-05T00:00:00+02:00

If you enjoy reading novels, and wish to learn a second language, then you’re in luck, since reading can form a highly motivating and effective way for you to absorb the grammar, vocabulary and culture of a language.

Not so long ago, reading a novel in a second language was a mammoth undertaking, and required a very high level in the language, coupled with a lot of motivation. Today, things have improved enormously with online dictionaries and e-readers allowing you to lookup words while you read. It’s still a big task, but reading aids mean that you can progress more quickly, and tackle enjoyable, interesting stories far earlier than you would have in the past.

Every time you get stuck and need to look up a word or decipher a sentence costs you precious mental effort which should be devoted to the story you are reading. By making the lookup process frictionless you are able to devote more of your brain to understanding and enjoying the story.

Kindle and other e-readers offer translation but it isn’t their core functionality so often the experience is slow and requires tapping the screen multiple times, sapping your limited concentration. Readlang on the other hand is designed for language learning, fast translations are it’s raison d’être, and it provides them in the most frictionless way possible. Just one tap to translate a word, or one swipe to translate a phrase.

Find a novel to read

Childrens’s books, or books you’ve already read in your first language can be a great choice. You can upload any novel to read with Readlang, provided you have it in plain text or DRM-free epub format. If you like Harry Potter, purchasing the epub from Pottermore is simple. If Harry Potter isn’t your thing, or you want more choice, things get slightly complicated…

The spanner in the works - DRM (Digital Rights Management)

All the major book publishers have decided to encrypt the ebooks we buy so they can only be read by software that they control, e.g. Kindle books can only be read on Kindle apps or devices. The reason is to prevent piracy (which it’s failing at) but as a side-effect makes it difficult for those of us who purchase books legally to read them with our preferred software. Luckily there is a way around this which requires following a few technical steps, so if you’re reasonably computer literate, and have decided to read a whole novel in a new language, it would be silly to let this little technical problem get in your way.

(Learn more about DRM at Defective by Design.)

The solution - remove the DRM (Digital Rights Management) from your book before uploading

(Note: I’m not sure about the legallity of this process in different countries, so check for yourself whether it’s OK to manipulate a book you purchased for your own personal use.)

To read any novel with Readlang, do the following:

Follow the appropriate instructions for removing DRM with the free software Calibre:

Instructions for Kindle books
Instructions for Adobe Digital Editions - this applies to books bought from Kobo, Google Play and others.
Other formats: search the internet and it’s likely you’ll find instructions on how to remove the DRM from it.

Export the book from Calibre in .epub format.
Upload the .epub book into Readlang via the upload page. DON’T tick the Public checkbox, this book should only be accessible to you and not shared with other users.
Enjoy reading your novel with Readlang’s translation tools, and optionally review your new vocabulary later with flashcards. Here’s a demo to help you get started.

NOTE: Readlang is free to use for unlimited single word translations, and comes with 10 phrase translations per day for free. For unlimited phrase translations, you can upgrade to Premium for $48 / year or $6 / month.

Please, please, please, DON’T share any copyrighted content publicly on Readlang, this is illegal and wrong.

Learn a language while you surf - training wheels for browsing the web in French, Spanish, German + 50 other languages

2015-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

The best way to learn a language is to form productive habits, and what easier habit to form than browsing the web? Turn your addiction into a powerfull learning tool with the redesigned Web Reader.

Install it as a Chrome extension (recommended)
Install it as a browser bookmarklet (for Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and mobile browsers)

After getting a great reception on various language learning and productivity blogs, I figured it was time to improve the web reader to help you read even faster, more comfortably, and put your web browsing habit to good use.

To benefit most from this you should have a basic understanding of your chosen language, if you don’t then I’d recommend starting with a beginner course. Top of my list would be 1) a good teacher in-person or over Skype, 2) a Michael Thomas audio course and 3) Duolingo. Alternatively, feel free to jump in at the deep end and use Readlang to puzzle your way through some native content.

Here’s how it’ll help you:

1. NEW “Translations Above” Mode arrives to the Web Reader

Switch between old Replace mode, and the new Above mode, which scribbles the translation as a gloss above the original word.

This will give you the correct meaning 95% of the time, and let you carry on with minimum disruption to your reading flow.

Less disruption => More enjoyment => Habit forming

2. NEW (Chrome Extension only): Nicer window arrangement

If a word isn’t correctly translated in-line, you can open a popup dictionary. This is now posisioned neatly to the left or right of your main browsing window:

(Note: This dictionary is customizable - for Spanish the default is the excellent WordReference but if you have a favorite dictionary, you can set it in the preferences.)

The Readlang toolbar is smaller and stays out of your way allowing you to enjoy the web page. If it is annoying in the default top-right location, click the Menu button and set it to one of the other page corners

On mobile devices, the toolbar shrinks down, allowing access to all functions from the Menu button

4. NEW: Open links while Web Reader is active

Click to translate works on links just like other text. To open the link, simply hover over it and click the Open Link → popup which appears.

On mobile devices, a little clickable → arrow will appear next to each link while the Web Reader is active.

5. NEW (Chrome Extension only): Seamless browsing experience

Once opened, the Web Reader will stay open while you browse different pages within the same tab. To close it, simply select Close from the menu.

6. Practice all your words and phrases with flashcards customized for you

This isn’t new but is worth repeating…

Every word and phrase you translate is converted into a flashcard. And not just any old flashcard, these advanced flashcards offer:

The context around the word / phrase. Context is extremely important for learning and flashcard apps often neglect it.
Word frequency lists are used to prioritize the most used words in a language first. Did you click both “cat” and “aardvark” while reading, well, the word frequency list will make sure you learn “cat” first. (Am I discriminating against aardvarks here? Why yes, I suppose I am, and so should you!)
A spaced repetition algorithm will ensure you spend your time optimally, by repeating the words you find difficult more often.

7. NEW: Updated web-site suggestions on the Links page

Each of the 50+ languages has a popular links page, full of news, blogs, short story sites, etc… The less popular languages may only have small selections, but the pages for the popular languages are well populated and extremely useful, e.g.: English, Spanish, French, German, etc…

With more people now using Readlang, there are more and higher quality popular links than before, so if you haven’t been there in a while, now is a good time to check again.

More to come

I really hope these new tools help to improve your language skills. There’s still plenty more good stuff to come, if you want to contribute to the direction of Readlang’s progress, please vote for your favorite ideas on the feedback forum.

If you like this or find it useful at all, please don’t keep it to yourself, consider if you have friends who may benefit. It is ideally suited for anyone who spends a lot of time on the web and wants a fresh approach to language learning.

Chapters and Rich Formatting

2015-04-15T00:00:00+02:00

Based on your feedback, Readlang has become a fully fledged eReader with the addition of chapter navigation, as well as bold and italics:

Quickly jump to any chapter with the navigation bar at the top of the reader page:

Chapter navigation while running as a full screen webapp on iPad

Add chapters and formatting to your texts

When editing plain text on the Upload Page or reader sidebar you can add special symbols (borrowed from Markdown) to mean the following:

Chapters

Add ‘#’ or ‘##’ to the start of a line to make it a chapter or sub-chapter heading respectively:

A main chapter can be created by starting a line with ‘#’:

# This a chapter title

A sub-chapter can be created by starting a line with ‘##’:

## This is a sub-chapter title

Bold and italics

To add italic to text, enclose it within ‘_’ or ‘*’.

I _love_ chocolate.

… will become this:

I love chocolate.

To make text bold, enclose it within ‘__’ or ‘**’. For example:

I **really** love cookies.

… will become this:

I really love cookies.

Superscript

To make text superscript, enclose it within ^. For example:

This has a superscript after it^3^

… will become this:

This has a superscript after it³

NOTE: one slight issue with the bold and italic formatting at the moment is that phrase translation won’t be able to span the boundary between italic and non-italic text.

EPub import

The easiest way to load a fully formatted book into Readlang is to upload a DRM-free ePub. Simply visit the Upload Page, and click Choose File. You can now enjoy Readlang’s acclaimed reading aids for language learners, from a fully featured eReader.

PS: To encourage other Readlang improvements, please add your own ideas or vote on suggestions at the feedback forum.

Auto Highlight Words As You Read

2015-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

Context is key when learning language. Wouldn’t it be nice to access previous contexts you’ve seen a word in every time you encounter it in a new text?

Based on popular demand, I’ve added the ability to auto-highlight words you’ve previously translated as they appear in new texts. Clicking on any of these underlined words will trigger a pop up showing the translation along with previous contexts.

From here you can:

Mark as remembered. This lets Readlang know you don’t need to be reminded of this word for a while.
Edit. Alter the translation and contexts associated with the word.
Delete. If a word is far too easy, or you clicked it accidentally, get rid of it.

To activate this feature, open the reader sidebar (the little ☰ in the top right corner), select the “AA” tab and enable the Ready to Learn (recommended) option.

This is currently only available within the Readlang reader interface, not the Web Reader. If you would like to see it on the Web Reader, or have another feature you’d like to see on Readlang, please add it to the feedback forum.

New Translation Glossing Mode

2015-03-08T00:00:00+01:00

Readlang’s main feature is inline word and phrase translation, as seen here in the Web Reader:

Replacing the word with the translation has a ‘magic’ feel to it, and doesn’t intrude on the reading experience like a pop-up box would. The disadvantage is that the very word you need to learn is hidden. To remedy this I’ve added an alternative mode which adds a translation gloss above it, and adds a space so that it’s not obscuring the line above, check it out:

Turn this on via the formatting options in the reader sidebar:

What do you think? Useful? Do you like the hand-writing font or is it too ‘cute’?

My Favorite Tools For Learning Spanish

2014-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

The best way to learn to speak Spanish is to just speak Spanish. Ideally with native Spanish speakers. But there’s also a lot you can do completely independently, and these are some of my favourite methods of self-study.

By the way, although I’ve focussed on Spanish, these methods are applicable for many languages.

1. Michel Thomas

This is a great place to start. It gives you a really good feel for the grammar, getting you to construct quite complex sentences from the very start, which really gets you motivated with the feeling of rapid progress. The format is unusual in that there are two other students on the CD who are learning alongside you and who will often fumble through an answer to be corrected firmly by Michel. It sounds strange but it really works. As with most language learning CDs, it’s best to actively participate, pausing after each question and speaking the answer aloud, or in your head, before listening to the student’s and Michel’s responses.

After finishing this course you should have developed a really good intuitive feel for the structure of the language, but will still have a very limited vocabulary.

2. Duolingo

Duolingo is an incredibly well made site, and it’s no wonder it’s become so popular so quickly. For someone who grew up with old Nintendo games the progress tree, hearts, lingots and other game-like elements really get me in the right frame of mind to level-up. And compared to the simple multiple choice questions of other learning websites, the free form text field you get to type your translations into is incredibly empowering. It gives you the feeling of genuinely being in command of the language when you translate a whole sentence correctly. The only downside is that it can be quite unforgiving and you may find yourself stuck at various points without an explanation how the grammar works. This is a minor niggle though since you can always look that elsewhere, and return to Duolingo to complete just… one… more… lesson…

3. Reading

Reading is a great way to assimilate the grammar, vocabulary and perhaps the culture, in an enjoyable and relaxing way. The trick is to find texts that you’re interested in at just the right difficulty. Here are some tips:

Use books you’ve already read After reading a book in English, try re-reading it in Spanish. I did this a Roald Dahl kid’s book and with the first Harry Potter book and despite being a little above my level, I didn’t get too lost since I was already familiar with the characters and the story. (Also, I read it within Readlang which made it easier.)
Parallel Texts These have Spanish on one page and English on the opposite page, so you can jump back and forth when the Spanish is proving too difficult. The problem is the lack of a good selection, I used this book of short stories which were useful although a little challenging for beginners.
Google Translate A trick that some people use is to paste an article into google translate, and read it like a parallel text. Of course it won’t be of as high quality as a human translated text, but the massive advantage is that you can use for any text of interest to you.
Click-to-translate The trouble with parallel texts and google translate is that they can become a crutch and make it too easy to rely on the English version. I prefer forcing myself to read the Spanish but to translate only the individual words and phrases that I don’t understand. I created the webapp Readlang to allow myself to comfortably read novels and other texts with tap-to-translate on my iPad, learn more about using Readlang to learn Spanish.
Get recommendations from other learners Ideally from your friends or people with similar interests. You can also broswe the most popular Spanish websites read with the Readlang Web Reader on this page, online newspapers like El País take the top slots but there are other interesting options too:
- Cuentos Breves - Short stories for children
- Cuentosinfin - Classic short stories
- Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre - The Spanish language wikipedia
- Spanish Podcast - Podcasts for Spanish learners with transcriptions

4. Flashcards

I’m not a fan of flashcards for most subjects, but when faced with the seemingly insurmountable goal of vocabulary learning, they are very useful. The most important aspect of a flashcard system, online or offline, is it must use an adaptive spaced repetition system to schedule your learning. This optimizes your time to make it possible to learn 1000s of words or phrases in a realistic period of time. The most popular online flashcard systems that do this are Anki and Memrise. Anki is open source and has apps for Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS and Android and and allows you to customize each flashcard with your own images, audio, and video. Memrise web-based and has iOS and Android apps, and allows users to contribute “mems” which are fun little images or sayings that help you remember a word.

I use my own flashcard system on Readlang, and I like it because it adds three key features compared to Anki and Memrise:

Every word or phrase added to your list is one that you encountered naturally while reading, and actually clicked on to translate it, indicating that you didn’t understand it. This means that without any extra effort on your part, while reading you are compiling a list of words to learn in a subject that you are interested in.
Each flashcard includes the sentence around the word for context. Context is very important both to disambiguate when a word may have multiple meanings, and to help form associations in your mind which is the key to remembering.
When you practice the flashcards, the most frequently used words in the language are fed into the spaced repetition algorithm first. This ensures you optimize your time by focussing on the most useful words.

Thanks for reading, I hope this was useful. If you have any other recommendations for self-study methods for Spanish or other languages, I’d love to hear them!

PS: I didn’t intend to mention Readlang quite so much, but it makes sense since I’ve spent almost two years shaping it to my tastes.

8 Reasons You Should Read More (includes waffles)

2014-05-28T00:00:00+02:00

Selfie of myself reading at the lab. Note the professional Readlang logo in the background ;-)

I’m already addicted to reading in my native language of English. As a child I would read computer magazines cover to cover, as a teenager I started reading novels like The Andromeda Strain, and now as a guy who works at a computer all day long, even when working I’m habitually reading blogs, forums, wikipedia articles, news sites, you name it! So when I decided to learn Spanish, it was only natural to make reading the foundation, and reading in Spanish is now my core daily language learning habit. Here are 8 benefits:

1. You can do it alone

Talking with native speakers is the most effective way of learning a language (the HB 2.0 system). But depending on your mood and how much energy you have, this can too stressful or tiring. Reading shouldn’t be a replacement for either written or verbal interaction but it’s a perfect way to continue learning in a more relaxed way.

2. Set your own pace

Unlike other forms of media like podcasts or video, you can read as fast or as slowly as you like.

3. Treat the story as a puzzle (extensive reading)

It’s OK if you don’t understand everything! It’s very gratifying the first time you can even roughly follow a story. A few years ago I was travelling in Latin America with a very low level of Spanish. I picked up a paperback copy of “La Máquina del Tiempo” (“The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells) and read the whole thing with the aid of a pocket dictionary. It was a vastly different experience than reading in English, I had to become a detective and enjoy piecing together the plot as best I could.

For this approach, the simpler the plot the better, and if you’ve read it before in your native language that will help. Other things that may help are parallel texts, or (shameless plug…) a modern language reading tool.

4. Treat each sentence as a puzzle (intensive reading)

Sometimes you may like to go more thoroughly to really analyse the structure and grammatical nuances. This can be slow going so only works for shorter texts. To be honest, I rarely do this kind of intensive reading since it makes it so difficult to follow a story. But hey, everyone’s different, perhaps you’ll enjoy it!

5. It’s addictive and habit forming

Once you find a text you enjoy, you’ll be compelled to keep reading. On the flip side, if you aren’t enjoying a text, don’t force yourself! I’ve made this mistake before and it’s not worth it. Switch to something you enjoy and you’ll have more fun and learn faster. The holy grail is to became so engrossed you just can’t stop reading, even if you wanted to! Finding the right material for you is key, which becomes easier as your ability increases, leading to the next point…

6. It creates a positive feedback loop

The more you read, the more of the language you acquire, the easier and more enjoyable it gets. Basically, the more you read, the more want to continue reading!

7. Exposure to many words in many contexts

Vocabulary isn’t only words, it’s phrases and idioms too, which often don’t make sense when trying to analyse or translate literally, but which will click into place after you’ve encountered them in many different contexts. For beginners, transcribed spoken conversations are great source of practical everyday vocab. For intermediate and advanced learners, novels and other prose forms are an incredibly rich source which will help take you to the next level.

8. Because of the waffle waitress ;-)

Finally, in the words of the legendary Bill Hicks (WARNING: some profanity in this video!)

Tips to take charge of your vocabulary learning

2014-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

Readlang now has a powerful new Words page:

This is a flexible tool to manage your vocabulary, whether you’re a hardcore language geek or simply looking for new ways to speed up your learning. Bear in mind that none of this is necessary to use Readlang, which you can very happily do using only the Library and Learn pages. The Words page is a great addition for those who want to take a more hands-on approach to their vocabulary learning.

Here are some useful tips for making the most of the Words page:

Review vocab after reading

The list is sorted to show your most recently added words first, so come here after a reading session to review the new words you’ve encountered, and either:

Star the words you’d like to learn first by clicking on the star icon next to it
Edit the translations for words if they don’t seem correct. To do this, click on the row containing the translation you wish to edit, and you’ll be presented with the edit panel, which contains a Word Reference or other dictionary definition to help you choose the correct translation
Delete the words you aren’t interesting in studying
Practice them with flashcards by clicking “Select All” checkbox (next to Actions), followed by Actions → Practice Flashcards

Cram study a list of favourite words for an upcoming trip or exam

Starred words are always prioritised highly on the learn page, but they still respect the spaced repetition algorithm, which is ideal for learning a large amount of words over a long time period. But sometimes you may want to study a bunch of words in a short time, which you can now do:

Click the star icon next to each word you wish to concentrate on learning
Click the Starred group from the sidebar
Click the “Select All” checkbox
Click Actions → Practice Flashcards

(If you have more than 25 words in your starred group, you will have to study the separate pages separately.)

Review your words before a flashcard session

To review those words queued up to enter the Learn page flashcards:

Select the Not Started group, which contains words which you haven’t started practising yet.
Set to sort by Usefulness, which will show you the most frequently used words first. This is the order that words get added to the flashcards on the Learn page.

This allows you to review all words at a glance and delete or edit them before starting a flashcard session.

(Note: a flashcard session consists of the most useful words from both the Scheduled and Not Started groups. If you have a lot of useful scheduled words, you will need to practice these first before you see your new Not Started words.)

Export words to study in Anki, Quizlet or your other software of choice

Choose the word group to export, probably either All Words or Starred
Click the select all button
Click the Select all XXX words button to select the entire group
Click Actions → Export
Customise the fields you wish to export, along with the order and the delimiter
(optional) If you don’t wish to export these words again, you may like to delete them, in which case, click Actions → Delete

Practice words from specific books

If you’re in the middle of reading a novel, you may want to concentrate on only learning vocabulary from that particular text. Focussing on these words should help you enjoy the rest of the novel more.

As soon as you have translated more than 10 words or phrases from the same text, it will appear in the sidebar below the other word groups.

Future possibilities

This redesign opens up possibilities for more cool features in future, such as:

Tagging - create custom word lists, in addition to the current “Starred” list.
Better search - currently it only searches the word and its translation, and it only works if you use the exact characters, e.g. searching for “cana” won’t work if you’re looking for “caña”. It would be nice to search through the context sentences too, and even better to search through every text you’ve imported into Readlang.
Filtering by website, so that you view words from a given website, just as you currently can from a given book.

What do you think? Do you find these new features useful? What would you like to see in future? Please leave your feedback and suggestions!

* Dictionaries and word frequency lists only available for some languages - list of language support.

Are some people naturally better at learning languages?

2014-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

I just read a fascinating article about the development of Hi-LAB, the “High Level Language Aptitude Battery” test designed to help the US military identify individuals with high language learning potential. It was borne out of a frustration with seeing so many language professionals getting ‘stuck’ at basic proficiency and not progressing to become fluent. After some research, CASL (Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland) concluded that the following three traits were linked to language learning success:

working memory - where you manipulate bits of short term, transitory information
associative memory - how well you link new information with what you already know
implicit learning - how well you extract patterns from exposure to lots of examples (e.g. by reading or watching television)

Basically, they’re trying to determine if certain innate abilities will predispose a person to be a better language learner. I’m very sceptical of studies like this, and usually tend to think that most people are capable of learning most things if they are motivated and try hard enough.

Here’s an interesting anecdote from the Hacker News comments from someone who’s been though a class which used an older aptitude test, the DLAB:

As far as the predictability of someone's aptitude, the DLAB was a good baseline to show that a person had better language acquisition than the average student. When students barely met the baseline of 100 points on the test, they had an incredibly tough time in the beginning with a language as different from english as arabic. What the test didn't measure, however, is a person's will to persevere through the slow progress, constant mistakes, and utter frustration. Although the low scoring students had a tough time in the beginning, most of them passed in the end. The student's that ended up failing out of our class were, ironically, the students that did exceptionally well in the beginning. I mostly attribute this to them relying on the ease of understanding in the beginning, rather than studying at the level that the lower scoring students had had to learn how to do when they had started out.

bazillion, Hacker News

He’s saying that will to persevere was the most important factor, which is what I tend to agree with from my experience. People I’ve met who are good at learning languages tend to enjoy and be fearless about talking and socialising with native speakers, and truly immerse themselves in the language. I tend to think this is far more important than any general ability test, and I think it would be a shame for people who score poorly on any one test to be put off learning a language when it may not be testing the most important predicator of ability - motivation.

From an academic point of view, I’m sure there is some natural difference in ability, and I’m fascinated to see whether researchers can shed more light on what makes some people innately better language learners than others. But I’d be very surprised if innate ability turned out to outweigh personal motivation. From a practical point of view, as someone planning to learn a language today, I wouldn’t pay much attention to these tests.

Practice Words From Specific Books

2014-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

By default, Readlang will select flashcards for you to practice which are useful, high frequency words, and are scheduled for review according to Readlang’s spaced repetition algorithm.

But what if you are focussed on a more specific goal? Perhaps your job or studies require you to learn technical terms, or perhaps like me you’re working your way through Harry Potter and would like to restrict your study to those books. I’ve recently added a new feature for Readlang Supporters that allows you to choose to study words from any text from which you’ve translated 10 or more words or phrases, for example:

It helps if your texts have sensible names so you can remember which is which - I’m looking in your direction Mithridates ;-).

Please let me know if you find this useful or not!

I have an idea to improve this, allowing you to upload a group of texts to represent the kind of texts you’d like to read, so that Readlang will prioritise vocabulary that appears the most frequently in those texts. Does that sound useful?

PS: I’m working on a big redesign of the “Words” tab at the moment, with searching and filtering though your translation history. It’s taking a little longer than expected, so be patient!

The Making of Readlang - The First 16 Months

2014-03-27T00:00:00+01:00

It’s been 16 months already. In that time the site has grown from nothing to almost 5000 users, and continues to receive awesome feedback and grow ever more quickly. But it’s not all roses. There’s a long way go to make this sustainable, and I’m very motivated to keep battling on and making it happen!

I wrote this post to share the struggles and challenges involved in creating an online business from nothing. For anyone interested in the completely open and honest story behind Readlang, check this out. (Be warned, it’s long!)

The story of the first 16 months of Readlang

Learn Languages with Harry Potter

2014-03-08T00:00:00+01:00

A failing of most language courses is that their content is so boring. It’s hard to stay motivated reading stories like “John goes to the supermarket”, I want to read about epic adventures, with drama, mystery, and wizards!

That’s why I’m so excited that the Harry Potter e-books are available to buy DRM free, ready to import into Readlang and help learn languages!

Why is this exciting?

Harry Potter is a favourite series among language learners.

Compelling characters, gripping storytelling.
It’s available in many different languages. [1]
Don’t take my word for it, the internet is full of people learning languages using Harry Potter.

Now that DRM free versions are available, this means it’s possible to read Harry Potter completely legally within Readlang, a reading interface lovingly designed especially for foreign language learners, which is getting rave reviews and testimonials.

Drag across words to translate them, Readlang is like an Ollivander wand for language learners!

Sound good? Here’s how to get started…

1. Buy the book from Pottermore

Pottermore is J.K. Rowling’s own website and online eBook shop.

Click this link to go to the Pottermore Shop

If you’ve ever purchased anything online this is reasonably straightforward, just make sure you:

Buy a version in the language you want to learn.
Select the “Direct Download” option after purchasing

2. Upload the book to Readlang

Go to Readlang and Sign Up or Login.
Click on “Upload Text”.
Click “Choose File” and select the epub book you downloaded earlier.

3. Read the book

Locate the book in your Bookshelf and click to open it.
Click on words, or drag across phrases to translate them. (NOTE: The free version of Readlang allows unlimited single word translations, but is restricted to 10 phrase translations and 10 explanations per day. Unlimited phrase translations and explanations are available for $6 per month or $48 per year.)
View additional translations in the sidebar.

Later on, you can work on learning the words or phrases you encountered while reading. Readlang’s flashcard system uses a clever algorithm to prioritise words based on their frequency, and a spaced repetition algorithm to customise the scheduling based on your past performance. Don’t worry about the details, but read and practice daily and it will work like magic.

Good luck, and please let me know if you enjoy this, encounter any problems, or have any suggestions, I’m always working on ways to make Readlang even better!

[1] DRM free versions are available from Pottermore in English (US and GB dialects), Spanish, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portugese (Brazil and Portugal dialects), Swedish.

The Unintuitive Secret to Remembering Words - Don't Try!

2014-02-26T00:00:00+01:00

If you’re stuck looking for the right word, does it drive you crazy? Do you pound your head on the table trying to remember it? Do you swear you’ve learnt this before? If only your brain would work! Just think dammit! Think!

There are two problems with this:

It’s exhausting
It doesn’t work!

Learning a language is a long game, you need to learn thousands of words, so can you really afford to struggle over each one? To expend all that mental energy? Of course not! And the great news is that you don’t need to. Don’t stress, move on, and after seeing it a few times, on different occasions, and ideally in different contexts, it will stick.

I’m not saying you can’t pause a second or two to see if the word comes to you, but don’t struggle or beat yourself up, it’s not worth it.

You’ve surely had the experience of having a word on the tip of your tongue. No matter what you do, it just won’t come. You leave it, and 5 minutes later, your mind wanders and the word comes to you, completely effortlessly.

I wrote this after seeing a number of people, typically beginners, approaching the flashcards in Readlang with the wrong attitude, and beating themselves up for not knowing an answer. The best way is to stay relaxed and not worry when you get a card “wrong”, remember it’s a learning aid, not a test. It’s completely fine and expected to forget things a lot. The only truly “wrong” behaviour is not practising on a daily basis!

How to apply this in different situations:

If you don’t know a word…

…while talking

Find another way to say what you want to, no matter how convoluted it is.
Simplify what you want to say.
Change topics.
Only say the word in your native language as an absolute last resort! (The risk with switching to your native language even for a second is that your partner will then switch to that language too, killing your practice!)

…while practising with flashcards

Read the context around the word and the word may come to you (I’m assuming it’s a cloze flashcard, remember it’s always better to learn words in context).
Just check the answer, and speak the whole phrase out loud.
(Optional) Some people like to create little memory association tricks involving puns, images, etc. Personally, I find this unnecessary, but if it helps you, go ahead.

And the main thing to remember - don’t try!

Fed up with flashcards? Try other word games for language learning

2014-02-18T00:00:00+01:00

Flashcards are effective, but let’s be honest, they can get a little boring. That’s why I created an API for Readlang allowing any web developers to create games which you can then play with your personal words and phrases.

Sentences

Simply type the missing words, whose letters flicker to give you a clue. Look to the right of the screen for the translations. As you complete each screen you progress to more difficult levels. See which level you can reach!

Play Sentences Now (requires a readlang.com account with previously translated words, the more words the better!)

Fill In The Blanks!

Drag each words or phrase at the top onto the matching sentence, making it disappear. Be quick, since once all the spaces fill up, the end game countdown begins.

Play Fill In The Blanks! Now (requires a readlang.com account with previously translated words, the more words the better!)

It’s Your Turn!

OK, I admit the above games aren’t exactly masterpieces, but they offer a fun alternative to the usual Readlang flashcards. And more than this, they are examples that hopefully inspire you, or any programmer friends you may know, to create better games built upon the API. Some ideas for more games are:

Word Search
Crossword Puzzle
Guessing Game (multiplayer) - take turns to explain a word to the other players, who have to guess what it is, a bit like the board game Articulate!. The pool of words can come from all of the players accounts. This would be awesome, but a challenge to implement well!
…use your imagination!

Note that the API allows adding new words so it could be nice to mix in other sources of words too, not only the ones from the user’s Readlang account. One great source of example sentences is Tatoeba, and they even allow downloading their entire database of nearly three million sentences from their downloads page.

If any developers are interested in trying out the API, please take a look at Readlang API github repo which contains the API documentation as well as the source code for the Fill In The Blanks! example game. Suggestions or comments are very welcome!

Readlang for Teachers

2014-02-12T00:00:00+01:00

UPDATE: This trial programme has now ended

I encourage you to use the normal Readlang features with your class instead.

Are you a foreign language teacher? Would you like to encourage your students to read more?

You can now create reading assignments on Readlang, and track your students progress to see where they need help.

Make reading fun

Students can read at their own pace at home or in the classroom.
Inline translations speed up comprehension and keep students engaged in the story.
Students love it, read the testimonials.

Teach more effectively

Readlang tells you:

The most commonly translated words & phrases.
How far each student has read.
How many words each student has translated.
How many flashcards each student has completed.

Presentation Mode

Review the most commonly translated words in front of the class with presentation mode.

Support this idea

Continued development of these features depends on the response I get, so if you are interested, please leave a comment below or share this with your colleagues. Thanks!

(Likewise, if you don’t like the idea, please let me know that too, and why!)

UPDATE: This trial programme has now ended

I encourage you to use the normal Readlang features with your class instead.

Learn Japanese and Chinese by Reading

2013-12-14T00:00:00+01:00

Finally Japanese and Chinese are available to learn on Readlang!

They work just like the other languages except that you need to drag across individual characters to select the words yourself. The reason is that languages without spaces between words make it very difficult to detect them automatically.

Please give it a shot and let me know if it’s useful or not, if you’re not sure where to start, this video may help: Readlang Tutorial

If you still have questions, please get in touch, I’m always ready to lend a hand!

Happy First Birthday

2013-11-30T00:00:00+01:00

I started Readlang exactly a year ago today. At the time I had no idea I’d still be working on it a year later!

Here are some fun statistics on how you’ve all been using Readlang:

2835 users
72 paying users
307,396 flashcards generated
527 articles shared
112 YouTube transcriptions shared

I’m excited about what improvements I can make in the following year! Stay tuned!

Firefox Extension

2013-11-20T00:00:00+01:00

Install the Readlang Firefox Add-On here: Readlang Firefox Add-on.

Once installed, you can access it on any web page by clicking the Extensions button to the right of the address bar (it looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece), and selecting Readlang Web Reader from the dropdown. Or, for easier access, you can click the gear icon next to Readlang and select “Pin to toolbar”.

Alternatively, on any web page you can right click the page and select “Import to Readlang” to import a readable version of the article to your readlang.com account.

NOTE: This article was updated on 14th Jan 2026. The original version of this blog post from 2013 described an older Firefox Add-on which is now obsolete.

Typing Mode

2013-11-11T00:00:00+01:00

You can now type your answers into Readlang’s flashcards! This has been on the cards for a long time, and after getting addicted to the amazing Duolingo recently I knew it was time to add it to Readlang.

To enable this, first enter the preferences page:

Then click the “Typing Mode” check-box.

Now, the flashcards in the Learn tab will ask you to type your answers in the language you are learning (but not in your first language):

I’ve been testing it myself and it’s so much more rewarding to type the answer and get told if it’s right or wrong.

If you get frustrated for getting told an answer is incorrect, when it is actually a different correct answer, it can help to edit your translations to be more specific, e.g. instead of translating the Spanish word “este” as “this”, use “this (male)” to remove the ambiguity. This isn’t always enough however and I do plan to allow multiple alternate answers in future.

UPDATE: I’ve now added the ability to add alternative answers. When you get a question ‘wrong’, a button will appear allowing you to accept it as a correct answer.

Another feature I’ll probably add is an on-screen keyboard with the special characters which are difficult to type without altering your OS settings. For now, I recommend finding out how to alter your keyboard layout on Windows, Mac or Linux and try learning to touch type in the language your learning, that’s what I do for Spanish and it’s far faster than reaching for the mouse half way through a word.

UPDATE 2: There is now an on-screen keyboard for the extra characters in each language.

Please let me know if you enjoy the typing mode, or if you prefer the old one.

Customisable Dictionaries

2013-11-07T00:00:00+01:00

Don’t like the current sidebar dictionary? Or is it missing for your language?

You can now put whichever dictionary you like in Readlang’s sidebar.

Enter the preferences page:
Enter the URL of the dictionary you’d prefer, using {{query}} in place of the word to translate:
Click Preview to check that it looks OK.
If satisfied, click Use this Dictionary.

Your chosen dictionary will now be available in the Readlang sidebar:

Readlang is getting Reddit-ized

2013-11-06T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and added voting to documents. It works much like Reddit and my hope is that if enough people share and vote it will provide a good stream of quality new content for language learners to read.

As well as Readlang texts, you can also vote on any web page directly using the Readlang Web Reader.

PS. Thank you to the users who have been sharing content, especially the prolific lyarraocatilla!

More Dictionaries

2013-10-10T00:00:00+02:00

Readlang uses the great WordReference dictionaries where supported [1], and recently I’ve been adding some other dictionaries to fill in the gaps, namely:

Welsh (Cymraeg) - http://www.geiriadur.net (it’s about time I added this one, my mum’s native language!)
Dutch (Nederlands) - http://www.mijnwoordenboek.nl
Persian (فارسی) - http://www.farsi123.com
Korean (한국어) - http://dic.daum.net

Thanks to the users who suggested each of these!

Now some of these don’t fit neatly into the sidebar, so I’ve added an “Open in new window” button to the reader page, and an “Open Dictionary” button to the Web Reader to open the dictionary in a separate window instead. This offers more flexibility for you to arrange and resize the dictionary as you see fit:

If you have suggestions for dictionaries for other languages, or if you have better alternatives for any of the current ones, please leave a comment below.

[1] Languages with WordReference dictionaries in Readlang:

Spanish
French
Italian
German
Portuguese
Russian
Polish
Romanian
Czech
Greek
Turkish
Japanese
Chinese

Tutorial Videos

2013-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday I uploaded a playlist of tutorial screencasts:

It starts with basic usage of the site, but the 4th video is more advanced, demonstrating how to create synchronised YouTube transcriptions yourself.

I hope you find these useful. I plan to add more in future, and to update them as Readlang improves. If there’s anything specific that you find difficult and would like explained, please let me know.

Introducing the Readlang Web Reader (alpha version)

2013-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I’m working on a feature that isn’t 100% complete but is too good not to share :)

It’s the Readlang Web Reader, and offers the same swipe-to-translate function as the current Readlang reader, but this time it works from within any web page. Check it out…

Your words and context sentences are saved to your Readlang account just as if you were translating a normal Readlang text.

How to use

Bookmark the following link. (Drag it to your bookmarks bar, you may need to set your browser to display the bookmarks bar first.)

Readlang Web Reader
Open any web page in your browser.
Click on the “Readlang Web Reader” bookmark.
Click words or drag accross phrases to translate them.

If people like this I have plans to improve it by adding a sidebar dictionary, and integrating it into the Chrome Extension. What do you think?

As always, please report any bugs or suggestions!

UPDATE: The Chrome Extension now opens the Web Reader exactly like the above bookmarklet.

Spaced Repetition, Version 2

2013-08-09T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve recently updated the way Readlang’s SRS (Spaced Repetition System) works. If you haven’t heard of SRS, I recommend reading this Wired article about SuperMemo creator Piotr Wozniak.

The Past

This is how Readlang used to work:

All words initially go to the “Not Started” group.
Words move into the SRS until your daily average schedule reaches your target (30 by default), and then you wait until tomorrow. More useful (higher frequency) words are moved first.
New words only move into the SRS when there’s room in your schedule.

This approach works fine if you want to do exactly the same number of flashcards, every single day. If you neglect them for a few days two bad things happen:

A backlog of scheduled words accumulates, so that when you return to Readlang you have an intimidating number of words to get through.
No new words will enter the system until you’ve worked through your backlog.

And if you go crazy and one day decide to increase your limit and pump lots of new words into the system, you’ve just guaranteed an unmanageable work load for the next couple of weeks. Think about what this does for motivation, instead of getting rewarded for learning more you get punished.

How important is that number of “Scheduled for today” words anyway? After all the distiction between “Scheduled for today” words and “Not Started” words is artificial, they are all words that you want to learn, so if you have entered 2382 words into the system it may as well say “Learn (2382)”, which is ridiculous. The number only serves to guilt you into doing your flashcards.

This is a common problem with SRS systems, and it can lead to disillusionment. It’s still a great method and if each word was equally important, then clearing your backlog first makes sense, but every word is not equally useful and so I think there’s a better way.

The Present

The new system is designed to fix these problems:

You can choose to do a small set of 10, 20 or 30 flashcards as many times as you like per day. The system doesn’t even tell you how many cards are scheduled for today, because I don’t think it’s important or useful. This puts you in control. Study as much, or as little, as you like.
The flashcards shown to you are the most useful (highest frequency) 10, 20 or 30 words from your entire collection of “Not Started” plus “Scheduled for today” cards. Usefulness here means word frequency, and can be overridden by starring words to favorite them.

Conculsion

The underlying SRS is still the same, but now it now:

more strongly prioritises useful (high frequency) words
splits studying into managable chunks
allows you to study as much or as little as you like

I hope you enjoy it!

PS. I'm currently working on an open API to allow others to create apps and games using your words in Readlang, stay tuned!

Favourite Words

2013-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

Readlang already uses word frequency lists to prioritise the most useful words in a language first. Now you can override this and bump your favourite words to the top of the list by starring them from the words page:

You can also star them from the sidebar in the reader page:

These words will appear as flashcards in the learn page before others in your “Not Started” list.

Multiple Contexts

2013-07-22T00:00:00+02:00

Now, if you translate the same word multiple times, Readlang will:

Use the translation you provided for that word, if you edited it before.
Store all context sentences where you clicked to translate the word.
Display one of the context sentences at random when displaying the flashcard for the word. You can also cycle through each of the context sentences.

e.g. Here I’m editing the word “tras” which has been translated in two different contexts.

Translate flashcard contexts

2013-07-16T00:00:00+02:00

While doing my flashcards, I sometimes notice another word I don’t understand, apart from the one on the card. Now the contexts are translatable by clicking just like full texts, and doing this will generate new flashcards for those words if they don’t already exist.

Click And Drag

2013-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

Drag to Translate Phrases

People seem to like Readlang’s phrase translate feature, but having to click on each word separately was a bit tedious. Now a simple click and drag, or tap and swipe, will translate an entire phrase in one fell swoop:

What used to be complete drag, is now a simple… well, drag. (sorry!)

Phrase Length Limits

The phrase translate feature has proved very popular. But some people have been using it translate whole sentences, which wasn’t really it’s intention, so to keep my Google Translate bill under control, I’ve limited the phrase length to 8 words maximum.

Support Readlang

Also, as people continue to sign up for the beta, I need to ensure that the site is sustainable. To this end, phrase translation will be restricted to only 10 phrases per day for all new users. Or, for only $29.99 / year or $9.99 / 3 months, you can become a Readlang Supporter, which lets you:

Translate unlimited phrases
Benefit from future features
Encourage continued development of Readlang

This will allow more people into the beta test without endangering my finances. Even in it’s beta state Readlang has proven itself a very useful learning tool for myself and many others, I hope it will for you too.

Edit and Share Documents

2013-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

I’m excited to tell you about two new features.

Edit Documents

You can now edit any book or article that you imported to Readlang. Just open the Sidebar and go to the Edit tab:

Why keep your perfectly edited documents to yourself? Share interesting articles with your friends or students from the Share tab in the sidebar:

Articles shared here will appear in the Library tab for the appropriate language.

I’d like to make the public library the best place on the web to find articles and links for language learners. Here are some ideas I’m considering:

Automatically grade each article by difficulty
Allow users to curate lists of articles
Allow users to discuss articles in their target language

Can you think of any features that would encourage you to share content on Readlang?

A Future Language Learning Platform

2013-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

Here are a bunch of popular language learning websites:

Anki
LingQ
Memrise
Duolingo
Readlang (OK, not as popular yet but I had to throw it in there :-)

Notice a common thread? They all re-implement their own spaced repetition system and all except for LingQ¹ don’t share their data². This means if I’ve invested time with one tool, there’s a resistence to switching to a new one. And the experience I have with a new tool will be inferior until it learns about me.

Imagine if all these tools backed onto an open learning platform which stores your progress on each word or concept. You could encounter a new word on Duolingo one day, test yourself on it with flashcards in Anki the next, then encounter the same word in an iPhone game the next day, and all these events would contribute to the same user profile. New apps would hook into this data to provide you with a personalised experience from the start. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Of course, getting all the existing sites on board with this is a tough proposition. But if this existed and got a bit of traction, users would demand that new language learning tools or games use it.

I’m not sure exactly what it’ll look like but it should provide an open standard API to:

Store a list of your unknown vocabulary
Record your encounters with that vocabulary, both passive and active
Use word frequency lists to prioritise useful words
Use a spaced repetition to provide a stream of word to learn, along with related data like example contexts and hints

For bonus points it could incorporate grammatical rules, understand conjugation of verbs, provide good dictionary definitions, translations, etc…

I predict that one day an open platform like this will exist, and an ecosystem of connected language learning tools will emerge.

LingQ does provide an API allowing read/write access to the words and the spaced repetition data, which is good, but doesn't seem to have attracted much of an ecosystem as far as I see. Largely due to the paywall for users.
I suppose you could look inside Anki's local sqlite database, but if you're developing for the web, that doesn't count.

</small> (PS. As for how these ideas may affect Readlang, I’m not exactly sure yet, but stay tuned!)

Happy Half-Birthday!

2013-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

Today is exactly 6 months since the first lines of Readlang’s source code were written:

commit 945599f750750ed19c37fe7337934f5e83999e8a
Author: Steve Ridout <steveridout@gmail.com>
Date:   Fri Nov 30 10:56:31 2012 +0100

	initial commit

And the idea to make the site was only born a couple of days before that, so it really is a half year old. I was living in Spain and frustrasted with my progress in Spanish. At the same time, I was keen to start a new programming project, and Readlang seemed a natural fit. I’d code the site by day, and in the evenings I’d test it to read books and learn Spanish, perfect!

I got a reader prototype up and running pretty quickly, and I was reading a novel with google translations within the first week. The site’s come a long way since then. I wonder what it’ll look like in another six months time…

YouTube Transcriptions

2013-05-12T00:00:00+02:00

There’s a new feature on the site. It started life as plain audio to listen along with texts but got ‘upgraded’ to YouTube instead, for three reasons:

There is a vast array of content already on YouTube.
It has video - you can see things!
I don’t have to store all the audio on my server, which keeps things simple for me.

I still think that plain audio would be cool to have, but this lets me get something out there that works, and get back to improving the more core aspects of the site.

You can try it out by watching the following videos in Spanish:

Extr@ Español 1 - A very cheesy sitcom made especially for beginners.
El Principito - An audio book of the beautiful classic novela.

Let me know if you think this is useful, or if you think it could be improved.

The 200th Beta Tester

2013-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday the 200th Readlang beta tester signed up. A modest number but it keeps me motivated, so thanks to all of you, especially those who are using it regularly and providing feedback!

I’m working on an audio feature now that I’m very excited about. Will share more details when it’s ready.

Phrase Translation and Anki Export

2013-03-15T00:00:00+01:00

I introduced readlang on the How To Learn Any Language forum recently and have received some useful feedback. I’ve implemented two of the suggestions already.

Translation of phrases

Sometimes single word translations aren’t enough, for example when translating idioms.

To use, translate one word as usual.

Then, click the next word, in this case “lugar”, et voilà!

Export to Anki

I hope you enjoy using the in-built flashcards in Readlang, but if you prefer to use Anki, now you can. Simply click on the Words tab, and click the “Export these words to Anki” link.

You need to be signed in to use the Anki Export, but don’t let that stop you, for now at least, everyone signing up will get a free account for life.

Word Frequencies

2013-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

Readlang got an awesome new feature today, it now prioritises words by their frequency.

This means I get to learn the most useful words first, which is important since I have over 500 words sitting in my queue:

Thanks to Hermit Dave for his list of word frequencies which made this feature so simple to add to the site. The only language missing is Catalan, sorry!

Video Tutorial

2013-02-26T00:00:00+01:00

Update. The video below is out of date, here is the latest version.

I’m still busy working on the site and have made a short screencast to introduce the basic features.

Parallel Texts

2013-02-03T00:00:00+01:00

Parallel texts are a great learning tool for beginners. These allow you to quickly switch back and fore between the translated version and the original without breaking your flow too much. The problem is it’s almost too easy to rely on the translated version, and figuring out the matching point in the translated version sometimes takes a little searching. Aside from portability they haven’t improved much in over 2000 years.

Added to that, the selection of books available is very limited, typically they are collections of short stories by authors I’ve never heard of. Good luck finding a parallel text version of the latest George R. R. Martin novel!

I’m sure e-readers will improve parallel text reading in future. They could hide the translated version and only display it where required, identify the corresponding words or phrases between translations, and even automatically generate parallel texts from two versions of the same book. I’d love to work on these features for Readlang one day, but there are so many other things to improve first.

Learn Languages By Reading

2013-01-31T00:00:00+01:00

I’m a huge fan of reading to learn languages. It’s less stressful than interaction or formal studying, it gets you a lot of exposure to new words and grammar, and can be very enjoyable. How enjoyable depends on the difficulty, the content, and your tools for translating.

The first two are closely related, and for a complete beginner it’s almost impossible to find interesting content that’s accessible. At this level you’re restricted to simple kids stories, which get boring fast. For more interesting content, it takes so long to struggle though that you quickly lose the context of what you’re reading. What you need is to reach the level at which you can follow the plot of a novel, or the gist of an article, and get enjoyment out of it.

Translation tools can enable you to read content beyond your capability. The traditional method is the trusty dictionary, which breaks your reading flow every time you use it. Now in the early stages you shouldn’t translate every unknown word, just enough so that you get the idea. But if that means translating a word per sentence, you’re doomed when it comes to understanding and enjoying an interesting story. It’s just too much effort. Modern eReaders offer far less disruptive translation, in Readlang a single click on a word is all that’s needed.

One argument in support of paper dictionaries is that the act of looking up words will help you learn. Some take this further and manually jot down a list of translated words. There is some truth to this but it’s very inefficient and makes reading less enjoyable. This is the main problem I created Readlang to solve, it will remember translated words for you and test you on them later, without breaking your flow.

I’ve just opened Readlang for public beta, try it out.

Readlang Blog

Better voices in Readlang

Three new ways to make learning with Readlang more enjoyable

1: Context-Aware Translations

2: Audio Upload & AI Transcription

3: Readlang Story Bot

58 New Languages Just Landed! All with Explain Support!

Review Summaries

Introducing Read-Aloud

Customization

Improvements to the reading interface

Page navigation

Extra context

Sub-headings now appear in the title bar

That’s it for now

Context-Aware Explanations (Smart Definitions V2)

The Key To Learning Anything

Delete Flashcards While Reading

Smart Definitions

Readlang Is Back!

The Readlang Method for Learning Vocab

Where to start

How to read

How to drill vocabulary

TL;DR

An Instapaper For Language Learners

Web Importer 2.0

Using the Web Importer

Introducing Shelves

My Texts

Browsing

Searching

Arranging Texts on Shelves

Other Actions

Edit a Shelf

Re-Arrange Shelves

Share Shelves

Spanish Immersion Homepage - Chrome Extension

Keep your books, articles and videos organized

Speaking mode / Auto-Pronounce

To translate or not? Monolingual mode arrives

Translations On (default)

Translations Off (monolingual option for advanced learners)

Customizing your monolingual dictionaries

Web Reader

Give it a try

New Activity Monitor to encourage a daily language learning habit

Turn your favorite novel into a motivating and effective language learning tool

Find a novel to read

The spanner in the works - DRM (Digital Rights Management)

The solution - remove the DRM (Digital Rights Management) from your book before uploading

Learn a language while you surf - training wheels for browsing the web in French, Spanish, German + 50 other languages

1. NEW “Translations Above” Mode arrives to the Web Reader

2. NEW (Chrome Extension only): Nicer window arrangement

3. NEW: Compact, mobile friendly, movable toolbar

4. NEW: Open links while Web Reader is active

5. NEW (Chrome Extension only): Seamless browsing experience

6. Practice all your words and phrases with flashcards customized for you

7. NEW: Updated web-site suggestions on the Links page

More to come

Chapters and Rich Formatting

Chapter navigation

Add chapters and formatting to your texts

Chapters

Bold and italics

Superscript

EPub import

Auto Highlight Words As You Read

New Translation Glossing Mode

My Favorite Tools For Learning Spanish

1. Michel Thomas

2. Duolingo

3. Reading

4. Flashcards

8 Reasons You Should Read More (includes waffles)

1. You can do it alone

2. Set your own pace

3. Treat the story as a puzzle (extensive reading)

4. Treat each sentence as a puzzle (intensive reading)

5. It’s addictive and habit forming