Comment by steveridout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveridout | Hacker News Reader

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> What would speed things up for me is the ability to easily import translations from Google Translate into my flashcard app.

You might like to try my webapp for reading and learning a language:

http://readlang.com

It allows you to read shared texts or upload your own (.txt or .epub) or read any web page with a Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readlang-web-reade...)

You can click or drag across any word or phrase to get an instant translation.

Every translation is converted into a flashcard, along with the context sentence.

You can practice with Readlang's own spaced repetition flashcards or export to Anki if you prefer.

Hope you find it useful!

(I've been bootstrapping this for the past 2.5 years)

This is a really cool product. I am surprised at both the quality of translation and the seamless integration into the page. I am definitely going to be using this.

Great job!

That looks helpful I'll give it a try, what source do you use for your translations?

The in-line translations come from Google Translate. People often dismiss Google Translate but it's very good between English and the other major European languages. The quality isn't as good for less popular languages, or if one of your languages isn't English.

If you aren't satisfied with the translation, you can refer to another dictionary in the reader sidebar (or a popup window in the Chrome extension). The default for Spanish-English is WordReference, but users can customize this if they have another favorite (http://blog.readlang.com/2013/11/07/custom-dictionaries.html).

On top of that, you can edit all the words you translate, and if in future you click the same word, you'll get your personally edited version instead of Google Translate. So you're effectively building up your own large translation dictionary. One idea for the future is to use all these edits to crowd source better translations, but there's plenty of lower hanging fruit to get through first!

Great service. I hate these language learning websites that make me type out all the vocabulary so much.

Your's is almost exactly what I was looking for for a long time.

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