The Path to Fluency

Aiming for mastery in German & Japanese

Learning with Texts (LWT). Detailed review

Posted on | August 3, 2011 | 12 Comments

For the last 136 days I have been learning German. For 114 of those days, I did a German lesson on LingQ. On the 115th day, I discovered Learning with Texts. I have been using this program for the last three weeks (even reviewed it), and I want to share why I find it to not only be a valid alternative to LingQ, but also a great language learning application on its own merits.

LWT project page: link

Overview

Learning with Texts (LWT) is a reading application geared toward the language learner. The program is open-source and free and it supports all languages. One of the main aspects of LWT is speed. From the addition of new terms to the navigation between different screens, everything feels fast and seamless. The interface is user-friendly and it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

[Good Stuff]

Reading

Upon opening a text, you will be presented with a reading interface. All the words you’ve never seen before will be highlighted in blue, while words that you have dealt with in the past will have a different color depending on how well you know them (red being you barely know them and green meaning you most likely know them). There’s also the “Well known” status, identified by the grey background and green underline on words. I like the different color system for its ability to provide an overview of how well you know a text.

Clicking on a word causes three things to happen:

1. The first user-defined dictionary opens.

A dictionary defined by you will open showing the definition of the highlighted term.

2. The “Add term” interface opens

You can copy the definition from the dictionary or type it right away. You can also specify how well you know this word and look-up the term on different sites.

3. You get a popup

There are several actions that you can take here. The popups are mostly self-explanatory, although I want to comment on a few of things:

“St: [1] [2]…]” lets you set how well you know the word, in a scale from 1 to 5. In addition you can say that you know the word well “Wkn” or that you want to ignore it “Ign”.

“Expr: 2..am 3..ch …” lets you add multiword expressions (e.g: “Ich esse Eichhörnchen”). The number determines how many words you want to include (up to a maximum of 9).

Dict1 and Dict2 look up the term on an user-defined dictionary. GTr looks up the term (or the expression it’s in) on Google Translate.

I can’t get enough of these popups. Not only do they give me all the options I need to learn a term (or expression), but it also does it fast and efficiently. Being accustomed to LingQ’s “Creating LingQ” loading wheel, I can’t express enough how much LWT’s speed improves my reading.

Testing

Testing options are aplenty. You can choose to translate to and from your target language, and do it in context or just one word at a time. When you get a word right, its status is increased by one, and the opposite if you get it wrong. It’s simple, yet effective. I find the testing feature to be an entertaining addition, good for when you’re tired of reading.

When testing, clicking on the word will switch the word language. In the screenshot below, “schaute” switched to its meaning, “looked”.

Export & Import

You can export words and expressions for use in other applications (e.g: Anki, Flashcards Deluxe, etc), which is great if you want to study new terms from the texts you just studied.

You can import all of your terms from LingQ or from any other source, as importing in LWT offers plenty of options. The transfer of my terms from LingQ to LWT was smooth.

[Okay stuff]

Statistics

The first screenshot shows you the number of words in the different levels of knowledge.

The second screenshot shows you the number of words / expressions created (C), modified (A = activity), and set to known (K).

It’s definitely not a priority, but I would like to see these statistics in different ways (e.g: graphics), and also see different statistics for testing.

Adding a new language

While being able to use any language on LWT is a great asset, the way to add languages might appear menacing. There are default settings for a few languages, but for others you’ll have to input the fields on the screenshot manually. Fortunately LWT’s documentation explains how to fill the form up. I’ve actually gone and created a public spreadsheet where people can input the information needed to set up a language on LWT. Find it here.

Installation & Adding Media

LWT doesn’t come in a installer package. It requires you to manually move files and install other programs (e.g: MAMP for mac, XAMPP for Windows). While it’s not the most comfortable thing to do, the way LWT is built makes it so that it can work on any operating system as long as they have a web browser and are capable of running Apache and a MySQL server (Mac, Windows, and most if not all Linux distributions are able to).

Adding media (audio files) has to be done by putting files in a folder in your operating system or in Dropbox. At the moment there’s no support for uploading files directly from the program.

If you are willing to sacrifice speed, you can find an online, already set-up instance of LWT for free on the fluentin3months webpage.

Final thoughts

In my three weeks of use I’ve come to get to know LWT many features, and I’ve gotten accustomed to its speed and ease of use. I feel strongly that this application is the next big thing in language learning, and as a passionate user, I just wanted to share with others what has been so useful to me.

Let me know if you have some feedback or questions!

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    Category: Learning, Resources, Reviews

    Comments

    • Jazzboy

      I completely agree with your review, it is a fantastic program.

      I had always liked the idea of the type of system used at LingQ but thought it would be better to have a system which is not tied to an online server. LWT works very quickly and I never need to worry about being online or server maintenance issues.

      I’m so glad to finally have a program with the same kind of functionality as LingQ but without the limitations and I can finally start learning Norwegian the way I have wanted to for so long. The fact this program is free blows me away too.

      I hope this program spreads and becomes well known. The developer of LWT has done a great service for language learners.

      • http://thefineapps.com Clarence Olivier

        I share your thoughts about LWT. It’s just great and it has helped me immensely. That’s why I’m trying to have as many people as possible discover this wonderful program :D .

    • cacawate

      Absolutely spot on review of the program. I noticed you are learning Japanese. I’d like to see how you handle the parsing of Japanese before entering it into the text. I’ve seen some threads on using MeCab or Kakasi, but I’m not familiar with them yet.

      Also, I have a review on LWT as well that focuses on the issues of the parsing of some Asian languages (Korean, Thai and Japanese). You can check it out at: http://simplelanguagefoundation.com/banter/learning-with-texts-and-parsing-part-1/

      • http://thefineapps.com Clarence Olivier

        Thanks!

        I’m not reading texts in Japanese yet, just learning the Kanji (RTK). I’m sure I’ll have my share of issues once I get started though :P .

        I read your articles on the parsing of Asian languages on LWT. Great links there! I’ll definitely try the MeCab parser solution posted on the Reviewing the Kanji forums. 

        As you mentioned on the first part of the Asian parser articles on your blog, Learning with Texts has only one parser. LWT being an open-source project, I can only hope that by the time I’m done with the RTK Kanji someone will have developed an asian parser for it :) . 

        • cacawate

          Me too! In the mean-time, I am developing an interest in Natural Language Processing and this weekend I am working through a book on NLP and Python. I hope this gives me a heads up on how to approach this issue and I have a tangible solution for it in LWT before you start on it.

          I assume you also visit the RevTK forums. I post there, and of course I’ll update my progress on the blog. I may do a review on the book as well.

          • http://thefineapps.com Clarence Olivier

            Good luck with your project! 

            I really only look at the thread where there’s one picture for every kanji. It help me recall them from memory sometimes :) . (This is the thread: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=2553&p=1 )

          • http://thefineapps.com Clarence Olivier

            Are you still struggling with parsing of Japanese texts? 

            I’ve managed to insert spaces on a Japanese text by using Mecab with the command on this forum post: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=154899#p154899

            It took me about 15 minute to set the whole thing up, and now I can do it with any 日本語text really fast :) .

            • cacawate

              I got it working with python flawlessly now. I actually posted the code I use in that thread. I’m also working on a nice GUI version that may extract some other useful information and direct it to different frames.

              I hate to reinvent the wheel, but I don’t understand PHP and the idea I have, although based off of LWT, has a few more tweaks and things to make it more user friendly and efficient.

              If you know any python developers that are interested, send them my way! Haha!

            • http://thefineapps.com Clarence Olivier

              Ahh.. I had missed the last forum posts. I’m happy to see someone is working on that (especially the web app which would not only work on Windows, but on Mac & Linux as well).

              Am I wrong in guessing that you are trying to modify LWT to essentially have it native support for Japanese parsing? 

              The only PHP developer I know is Jean Pierre, the creator of LWT (http://twitter.com/#!/LWT_Project). If you show him your code and tell him what you want to do, he might give you a few suggestions on how to implement your idea. 

            • cacawate

              It was my initial goal to implement Japanese, Thai, and Korean (for particle detaching) spacing into LWT. So, I set out to learn about Natural Language Processing and found the easiest way to learn it was through Python.

              Now my goal is a bit different. I want to create a nice GUI program similar to LWT but with a few changes that will accommodate all languages. Nothing is set in stone though, and it’s more of a hobby/challenge to eventually learn how to code.

              I think I will contact Jean Pierre and see if he has any tips or ideas. Thanks!

    • Oscar

      Excellent review for this excellent tool I just discovered. Thank you very much!!

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=538045527 Daniel Carrasco Bascuñán

      Now it’s been over a year since you’ve been using LWT (assuming you haven’t stopped). How many terms have you accumulated so far? :)

  • Progress

    RTK (100%)
    2,042/2,042 Kanji
    RTK 3 (100%)
    965/965 Kanji
    German sentences on Flashcards (10%)
    1,000/10,000 sentences

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