Sharing the Goodies

The number of available texts on ReadLang is still small. I want to encourage everyone to share what he found useful in his journey of learning. In this way the power of the method ReadLang would flourish.

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I wholeheartedly agree, with one caveat: please don’t share texts which are copyrighted and which you don’t have permission to share :folded_hands:

I’ve never really used the public texts, but I looked at a couple recently and noticed that there were quite a few errors in them. Take this French text as an example. I found six errors in the second paragraph (mostly related to the incorrect formation of the passé composé, which is the point of the text, so it’s doubly bad that it’s demonstrating it incorrectly). That text has 198 likes, so presumably a lot of people have used it and potentially been misinformed about how to form the tense.

This made me wonder whether the texts could or should be moderated. I fully understand that this is a bit of a rabbit hole, and that some solutions would involve a lot of work. But here are my initial thoughts in order of what I assume would be least to most difficult to implement:

  1. Add a source URL field so that people could verify the accuracy of texts themselves. Maybe add another field for notes, where people can say where the text came from.

  2. Implement a basic ‘flagging’ or ‘reporting’ mechanism that notifies the text creator of potential issues that require editing.

  3. Create a flagging or voting system that could display a message on the text saying, ‘There may be issues with the quality of this text’, based on some threshold of votes.

  4. Some kind of basic commenting feature that lets people add public notes and corrections to texts..

  5. The ability to collaboratively edit/suggest edits for texts.

I now have a fixed workflow for finding texts. I use YouTube videos that I find interesting and upload them as MP3 files to Readlang. The text recognition is pretty accurate; I haven’t had any major problems so far.

To convert YouTube videos to MP3, I use a yt-dlp Python console tool (I’ve created a shortcut for this on my iPhone).

However, since the videos are copy-protected, I can’t share these texts. In addition, MP3 uploads are only possible with a premium subscription. But when I see how many videos I’ve watched and read so far, I can safely say that it was definitely worth it.

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It’s so easy to add stuff to Readlang, and since there is so much content out there, the trick I think is really honing in on what makes you excited to engage with your target language (maybe an interesting blog, or a Youtube channel, or an author) and adding as much stuff for yourself as you can. Wikipedia is also a great jumping-off point, there is a tool called Wikipedia Text Extractor that can remove all the hyperlinks and graphics for an easy import to Readlang.

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