steveridout

Looks cool! Some of it seems very intuitive, like the arrow pointing back to indicate the past, or the double arrow to indicate plural. I could imagine a set of symbols like this being a very nice addition to a dictionary allowing fast identification of the part of speech and conjugation.

My TODO list is already way too long with core Readlang stuff to do this kind of integration at the moment, currently I don't even detect whether a word is a noun, verb, etc. It's all handled by google and the external dictionaries. I look forward to following your progress though. Good luck!

Sounds like you might like the Language Immersion chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion...

Only if your native language is not English. There's been a uservoice suggestion to allow it to work in monolingual mode for ages (https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggest...) - I've been avoiding this so far since it's a big change to how the inline translations and flashcards would have to work.

Learning a language is going to take a lot of time and effort, no argument there.

But not all methods are equally effective so anything that reduces the time or effort required, even if just by 10%, is technically a 'short cut'. And anything that increases your enjoyment of the process is a win, regardless of whether it saves time, since it will help maintain motivation. Losing motivation is surely the most common reason people fail to learn.

The main idea here is to reduce the friction of reading as much as possible, freeing up your attention to focus on understanding and enjoying the text. The machine translation is only used here for words and short phrases, where it's more effective than for complete sentences.

(I'll take your word for it that google translate isn't so good with English-Chinese, I'm mainly focussed on the European languages for now)

It's actually pretty good as far as machine translation goes. For long complex sentences it can be misleading, but the use case here is to translate words and short phrases good enough for you to understand the meaning and enjoy the text, and for that purpose it works well 95% of the time. For the other 5%, you can usually tell from the context that it's not correct, and there's a popup/sidebar dictionary you can refer to. Please give it a try and let me know if you think it's useful or not.

I think for Japanese, Rikaichan probably beats Readlang right now because it can detect word boundaries, and probably has other features specific to Japanese that I can't afford to spend time on with Readlang yet.

It would be awesome to improve Japanese support later after it's achieved success with the main European languages.

Sorry, no plans at the moment. It still seems too niche to be worth adding.

Would love to hear if anyone has achieved significant increase in payments after adding bitcoin in addition to paypal & credit card.

Completely agree - I would have probably gone crazy or given up by this point if it wasn't for my girlfriend.

Harry Potter is one of the very few bestselling fiction eBooks that can be purchased DRM free: https://www.pottermore.com

If only more publishers would do this, it would be far easier for me to recommend novels for users to buy to read on my site!

You shouldn't feel the need to delete infrequent words like this manually.

The flashcards use the frequency to prioritize the useful words first, so provided you have a large enough pool of translated words you will never see the really infrequent ones. (The exception is that if you star any word, it will be bumped to top priority)

Agree it could be nice to show the frequency information in the word list somehow, but it needs to be subtle / hidden enough not to clutter the UI.

Is doing every language effective? Most of them cause me no/very little extra effort so I figure why not. The danger is that learning some of the languages gives a worse experience and may negatively impact the users' impression of the entire product. e.g. the site isn't great for Japanese and Chinese which should have extra features such as Furigana/Pinyin, and smart word boundary detection (they don't use spaces to separate words).

Is google translate good enough? Depends. It's certainly not good enough to trust 100%, which is a big issue for beginners. But once you have a basic level of understanding you can generally tell from the context whether a translation makes sense or not. If you're not convinced, you just need to open the extra popup/sidebar dictionary, and I encourage users to check and correct any translations the first time they encounter them in the flashcard section.

I added the YouTube feature very early on, when the rest of the site was rougher round the edges, and felt I should have concentrated more on the core reading experience. Now though, I'm glad the feature is there, it's great for listening practice, some people get satisfaction from syncing and sharing videos, and it's one extra way to impress people when demoing the site.

Regarding plain audio - this isn't on my immediate TODO list but I agree it would be cool. Personally I'd love to listen to podcasts + transcriptions to help me learn.

I don't do any processing - the phrase goes directly to Google.

Users can edit the translations so I'm accumulating data which could be aggregated in future to improve translations, but not doing that at the moment.

Hmm, sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but from your suggestions it's not clear if you realise that the extension is intended for reading in your target language and translating occasional words to your native language.

e.g.

> ...and in subsequent pages will display them in the target language without the user doing anything. They will no longer be displayed in the user's language.

The idea is that to learn Spanish, you read Spanish webpages, so everything is displayed in the target language at first, and you click to get the English translation.

Detecting words which are unusually frequent in the page you're reading, and automatically adding a translation to the first instance is a cool idea.

> The first message it displayed was that I had to drag some link, etc.. Why is that?

I think you're referring to the bookmarklet that needs to be installed to translate webpages, this is an alternative to the Chrome extension and works on almost all browsers.

> I had a message saying "This is a very large page"

Yeah, this is pretty ugly, should think of a nicer solution.

Apart from that one Harry Potter article, I haven't found content marketing to be that effective in attracting new users, mainly because I haven't invested enough time in it. The low hanging fruit I'm going after first is to add more landing pages and product information about Readlang. Later I might try getting language teachers and bloggers to help out with the content marketing, I can't see myself doing it frequently since it takes too much time from working on the product. Definitely need more content for SEO, almost all my search engine traffic queries at the moment contain the term "readlang".

Being bootstrapped, my core metric for the moment is revenue and the graph is looking pretty bumpy at the moment, I may follow up with a blog post digging into the details.

Onboarding - I completely agree, I started playing around with more walkthough hints, using a rabbit character (a la Clippy) that guides you though the process, but abandoned it since adding more complexity felt wrong when the underlying UI should probably be clearer. Still plan to add a nice checklist of items that new users are encouraged to complete.

Love that Kathy Sierra article about learning - remember reading "Head First Design Patterns" about 10 years ago, first impression was how tacky all the clip-art looked, but I ended up really impressed with how engaging it was. At the moment, Readlang is still best for people who already know they want to practice by reading and just want a better, more convenient method. Long term, I want to make make it a slightly more guided and engaging experience. This could include personal recommendations of articles, gamification around both reading and flashcard practice, and social features e.g. write a summary of the previous chapter in Spanish, discuss the text with other users.

I agree a full English translation would be nice for beginner learners, ideally a real human translation, similar to a parallel text. For now the product is targeted at intermediate and advanced learners but definitely something to consider as it broadens to appeal to beginners.

Opt in to the daily flashcard email is currently presented once you finish a flashcard session - pretty hidden - I'll make it more visible! (note: currently all users who've translated a bunch of words get a lifecycle email 2 weeks after signing up with a plain text version of a flashcard)

I'll experiment with adding a way to upgrade from the get go. I was concerned that upselling before users had a chance to play with the product could scare them off, but will try it out!

I'm gradually learning and will work on making my marketing more user focussed. This image really sums it up and sticks in your head: http://www.useronboard.com/features-vs-benefits/

Thanks again, really awesome feedback!

EDIT: slight readability tweaks

That's a bit worrying - do you know at what stage it stopped working exactly? Please get in touch (steve@readlang.com) with some more details and I'll be happy to upgrade you for a couple of months for free.

I've had this reaction a few times, especially since a LifeHacker article (http://lifehacker.com/readlang-helps-you-learn-a-foreign-lan...) which compares it to the Language Immersion extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion...) which works exactly as you describe.

Readlang is intended to be used in reverse - you should be using it to read Spanish articles, and clicking on the words and phrases you don't understand to translate them to English. Learning from actual native Spanish texts is vastly preferable to machine translated Spanish. Of course the downside is that you need to:

a) have some ability in Spanish already

b) develop a new habit of visiting Spanish websites. You can get an idea from the most popular sites visited by Readlang users here: http://readlang.com/es/links (I've been thinking of exploring another idea for an extension which hijacks the Chrome "new tab" page to encourage this habit)

1 - good point, the best way to achieve this at the moment is to click to unhighlight the first word before clicking the second one. Even after clicking to unhighlight, the word will still remain in your word list, the idea being that it usually doesn't hurt to collect too many words, and the decision on which words to keep, and which to discard shouldn't take up valuable brain cycles while reading. The flashcards will prioritize the high frequency (most useful) words for you and if any extra words you don't want appear at that stage it's quick to delete them.

2 - the way it's meant to work is that if you select "the plane", then extend it to "the plane is", the larger phrase will overwrite the shorter one. It's definitely true that testing the translation feature can result in a lot of garbage appearing that you don't want.

I could add a collect words ON / OFF setting but obviously that would complicate the UI, so I'm resisting it.

Thanks for your feedback. I actually applied to YC with this a couple of years ago but the product was very immature, I'm a solo founder and I didn't get invited for interview. I'm more inclined to bootstrapping rather than taking VC which seems to be the path most (all?) YC companies take. I may re-apply for summer 2016 though since it sounds like an amazing experience.

Thanks very much, this is great advice!

(It's 4am here now and my brain is fried so will go through this in detail tomorrow.)

Yes, the texts are uploaded and synchronized by users. I should really add a way to easily flag up mistakes and contribute corrections.

Yikes! Thanks very much, just fixed it.

You could be right. It used to be 20 for free, but I lowered it so that more people would actually hit the limit and get the "Go Premium" message. It's hard to know what the optimal number should be. For a while I had a split test running where some users had 5, some 10, and some 20 per day. But there weren't enough users to see a significant difference in conversions.

If you select 2 adjacent words it will try to combine them into a phrase and you only get 10 phrases / day for free on the free plan. You get unlimited single words for free though so you CAN continue using it heavily without paying if you like, it's just not quite as useful.

My partner works, so up till now we've been 50/50 on everything, and in that case, having a partner reduces costs - since you can share lots of things.

It's $20 per 1M characters.

Not sure what unusual activity you're referring to, I pay for their translate API - I don't know how Language Immersion works but perhaps they are getting around paying for the API by loading a hidden version of the google translate page and scraping it - that's pure conjecture though!

Yep, I know it's sounds scary, but I believe it's the only way for the Web Reader extension to work. I don't do anything malicious (just trying to upsell you on the premium plan) but I'd completely understand if you were freaked out by that.

An alternative is to use the bookmarklet, which will only run javascript on those pages where you explicitly clicked to open it, it works exactly like the extension:

http://readlang.com/webReader

I pay to use the Google Translate API, it works very well for popular languages to/from English. Other language combinations aren't so great.

Not that hard! One trick is to move to a cheaper part of the world, I'm currently spending most of my time in Madrid which is a lot cheaper than my old home of London, so socialising is easy financially. The tougher problem has been pushing through and continuing when the usage has decreased for 2 months in a row, but things always seem to turn around and improve, and as long as things are moving in the right direction long term, I have a roof over my head, and enjoy what I'm doing, I don't see the point in stopping. (My thoughts may change slightly in the coming months since we have a baby on the way!)

EDIT: slight tweak

Who said it was going to be easy? ;-)

It's cliche I know, but most "overnight successes" involved years of hard work.

Creator of the Readlang here. I started this at the very end of 2012, and save for a few months contracting have been working on it full time since, doing everything myself. Growth has been slower than I’d like but just enough to keep me motivated.

It's a freemium webapp, originally designed to reduce the frustration of practicing my Spanish by reading novels, and later adapted to work on any webpage as a browser extension.

I always appreciate it when people share details about their business, so here are some numbers from the first 5 months of 2015 (Jan - May):

Google Analytics - Sessions: 120,000, Unique visitors: 53,489

Signups - 13,658

Revenue - $4768 (average of $953 / month)

Not spectacular, but when I look back, it took 16 months to make the first $1000 (http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-l...), and right now it’s making more than that every month! It’s a long road but I’m very excited about it’s future.

Any questions or feedback, please fire away!