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by hombre_fatal 911 days ago
The one-at-a-time UX is too slow I think. I'd rather see N words at a time and select the ones I don't know.

I'm also not sure how to use this tool in a learning workflow since you have to be able to copy and paste a bunch of text. I guess the use-case is when you're reading articles online on a desktop device, but as you read the article you can already pinpoint the words that you don't know, yet this tool makes you paste the text back into the tool and reconsume all the words again.

A better version of this tool might be a browser plugin that lets you click words as you read content online and add to a vocab list. This way as you practice reading social media or news in Spanish online, you can accumulate words and then do something with them. Maybe export Anki cards or whatever it was that you had planned.

3 comments

Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to https://www.languagereactor.com/ and it's great so far. Thanks!
Heh that's mine and Ognjen's project. :)
Well, thank you very much, because I'm really enjoying it. So far I've only tried Netflix and PhrasePump, but both are very helpful.

I'm honestly surprised by how well the Netflix integration works. I have a good friend from China who has more or less perfect English now, and I once asked him how he first become proficient and he said that he really got going by watching every episode of "Friends". I feel like LanguageReactor's Netflix tools are the same idea but on steroids!

> A better version of this tool might be a browser plugin that lets you click words as you read content online and add to a vocab list. This

There is a browser extension that does this called yomichan.

Huh, I literally built an app that does what you describe! Basically an e-reader for language learners called Polyreader. It's a stand-alone app, not a browser plugin, but it has lots of additional features like in-line translation. Maybe I should finally open-source it!