That makes a lot of sense. I had no idea what they were talking about. For me it’s always been very accurate even in Albanian. Glad you fixed it!
I’d like to add is that Youtube Videos on my iPhone is terribly laggy on Readlang for some reason. All of the text and sync features load and react so slowly that they are effectively unusable. Don’t know if that’s a known issue, butI’m tending to put my Youtube videos on LingQ so they are more accessible, even though I prefer studying the transcript intensively with Readlang.
This could be some combination of:
- Your device being slow
- The transcript being very long
Please let me know which model of iPhone you are using and which video(s) are being laggy.
Also, is it still laggy if you tap the “Disable Sync” button?
My phone is an iPhone 14 and haven’t had problem with any other apps and my desktop PC which is rather old can do all the Youtube modes just fine.
These hour+ episodes are the strongest example
But this morning, checking to see if Sync turned off on shorter videos works better, the video won’t even start playing, gives a playback error, so I can’t say if that helps.
It feels similar to the iPhone text to speech issue where Apple is forcing the software to go through some weird archaic bottleneck.
I do find Readlang reader’s integration with the dictionary so helpful! (Russian)
My experience with LingQ is limited but I like the approach and I did look at it seriously some time ago. I found the site clunky and Mike the cook bland so I held off on paying for a subscription and meanwhile found the open source LWT, inspired by LingQ. It has some annoying limitations but its simplicity is a virtue—and it includes a separate field for transliterations/phonetics, which I find really helpful. I’ve used LWT for several years now, mainly to study Persian.
If ReadLang had transliteration support, and if I could import all of the work I’ve done already in LWT—notes too as well as transliterations—I’d consider paying, since your site is so lovely and cool. But retyping all of that stuff would be miserable, so until Persian comes to Duolingo (which in my universe towers above all the other options, only because it actually gets me to study regularly) I’ll likely stick with LTW.
Man I completed neglected using readlang at all since resubbing because of those translations! Glad to hear it’s fixed. I’ll give it another try.
Trying Chinese on readlang right now. (I’m around HSK 4-5 level)
It seems that there just… isn’t a parser?
Not a good thing. The way it’s interacting with the language is completely wrong and IMO it would be better to not have Chinese at all than this kind of implementation. It’s straight up just teaching you the wrong things.
Steve, lingua Verbum just implemented Chinese and Japanese. Here’s a blog post where they talk about the different segmentation solutions and what they eventually landed on: Lingua Verbum
Well, when you already know a lot of Chinese (which I understand is what Steve thinks is the main use case for those using readlang) then you can usually understand how to parse out the words you don’t know. I study Cantonese on LingQ and am good enough with it that I don’t find auto-parsing very helpful other than that we need it to track the number of words we know.
That said, I’ve just joined readlang and have been finding it surprisingly helpful for languages I barely know any words in, as well. So I don’t want to say I think it’s the right stance that readlang is mainly for advanced students.
I’d wager a far higher percentage of beginner / lower intermediate chinese learners are reading than other languages because of the HSK standard and abundance of graded readers which follow it. I started reading when I knew 100 characters and hardly any multi-character words
As a native traditional Chinese speaker, I love how you are learning traditional Chinese instead of simplified Chinese, which what most people opt for. However, I would like to point out that in Chinese, it is more important and useful to learn phrases instead of characters. The reason of that is quite simple: 1) sometimes the character doesn’t mean anything or the meaning of which is different from the desired context. 2) most Chinese characters have multiple meanings in different context, and it might be hard for learners to distinguish between them. I’ve never tried using readlang for learning Chinese myself, but from what I read, readlang doesn’t group words together on default, so that might be a drawback.
As for the fact that traditional Chinese is not a choice here, I totally understand the reasons, but I also wish it could be a choice in the future.
Thank you for your reply. I agree that it’s more useful to learn phrases than individual characters. I always safe phrases rather than single characters. The problem with LingQ is, that the words are grouped rather randomly sometimes. Characters are put together as one word even though they are not actually forming that word in the specific sentence. With Readlang I can group the words and characters together as I want, which is more useful for me.
True, I really like how you can customzie which to merge together into a phrase on Readlang. This is really helpful in learning languages such as Mandarin and Japanese.