Can you allow English to English, Spanish to Spanish, etc? I know English very well but I still use a dictionary when reading advanced or older texts. Would be great to have the option to show synonyms in english when reading english.
Also, would be great to have more advanced ditionaries built in the dictionary section that explains the definition in the target language, so to have the option to have a definition for an english word in english.
There is some support for this already: To translate or not? Monolingual mode arrives - Readlang Blog.
If you enable monolingual mode I recommend also trying the Explain tab with it set to show explanations in the language you’re learning.
One way to make this better would be to have monolingual translation, as opposed to turn the translation off. Have ChatGPT pick the best synonim and display it at the top of the word, just like in translation.
One of the great things about this tool is being able to quickly see the translation of a word right on top of it with a tap. Once my vocabulary is above a certain treshold, I can probably switch to monolingual, but that changes the experience of reading on Readlang. It’s just not the same being able to tap the word and see it on top or having to look in the dictionary section.
The other thing is that I don’t use the dictionary tab. I use the explain tab. And I read that when I want more than just a word translation. If one word translation is dissabled, now I have to constantly switch back and forth between the Explain and Dictionary tabs. I can’t do that. If I have a 15,000 vocabulary in a language, I read decently well, I don’t want to keep switching back and forth between the Explain and Dictionary tabs. That’s just too much work, it intrerupts the flow and kills the joy of reading. The whole point of this tool as I see it is to be able to get the meaning of a word quickly enough to not forget the phrase I’m reading and not loose the though, with the ocasional use of an explanation.
Why not use just explanation then? Because it’s not the same thing. When I read an explanation, I have to stop reading the book. After I read the explanation, I go back and reread the sentence. It breaks the reading flow in a way in which just tapping on the word doesn’t.
Again, this is for more advanced reading and the challenge is how do you build a user interface that adds to the reading process and doesn’t interfer with it. Using explain alone break the flow. Switching back and forth between Explain and Dictionary, breaks the flow. Tapping a word to translate does not break the flow.
Unfortunately I see this as a worse option than just having a bilingual translation because it break the flow of reading at that advanced level, so I’ll stick with bilingual until we find a solution to this.
I imagine that it can’t be that hard to just rewrite the ChatGPT prompt to give a translation in the same language based on context versus a different language? I would imagine that it’s pretty much the same thing, the only difference beeing the output language.
Maybe it’s just me, but I started using Readlang as my primary reading tool. I use it to read books in my native language as well. It’s more than just a tool to learn a language. This tools has some amazing potential. That’s where these ideas are coming from.