Language Tools

All about language programs, courses, websites and other learning resources
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neofight78
Blue Belt
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=833
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Re: Language Tools

Postby neofight78 » Wed Jul 04, 2018 5:18 pm

Good luck dude, looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
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Christi
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Re: Language Tools

Postby Christi » Tue Dec 04, 2018 12:02 am

I've been looking for a site to practise reading Korean and LingQ is a bit confusing to me at the moment. However, I can't find any information on your site about pricing.
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2020 resolution words learned: 472 / 1000
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leosmith
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Re: Language Tools

Postby leosmith » Tue Dec 04, 2018 1:30 am

Christi wrote:I've been looking for a site to practise reading Korean and LingQ is a bit confusing to me at the moment. However, I can't find any information on your site about pricing.

That's because it's free Christi ;)
All you need to do is join, and you'll be able to see the "reading" tab in the upper toolbar. Here's a video to help demonstrate reading; we don't have a proper FAQ yet, but please feel free to message me at the site after you join. I'm leosmith there too.
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https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

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Querneus
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Re: Language Tools

Postby Querneus » Tue Dec 04, 2018 2:15 am

leosmith wrote:Now I just want to do good for the language learning community, since it’s given me so much.

If you're looking for projects, well, you say you know Russian at the B2+ level. I don't study Russian but I've heard comments that there's a dearth of readers for learners at the A2 and B1 level. Perhaps you could look into that? You could get your hands on public-domain texts (or texts in a permissive license like the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC), simplify them a bit wherever necessary, and provide a somewhat literal translation into English. If your product is electronic, you could as well add glosses you can access by hovering a word with the mouse or tapping it with a finger on a tablet/cellphone.

You could consider doing something like that with Thai as well, but getting public-domain texts is likely harder. Wikipedia uses the CC-BY-SA license, maybe you could use paragraphs from Thai Wikipedia?

I don't promise that such books, or websites/apps, will make much money, but you would contribute something nice to the language learning community. Better than a forum that competes with LLorg or a find-a-tutor service that competes with italki, in my opinion.
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Christi
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Re: Language Tools

Postby Christi » Tue Dec 04, 2018 7:51 pm

leosmith wrote:
Christi wrote:I've been looking for a site to practise reading Korean and LingQ is a bit confusing to me at the moment. However, I can't find any information on your site about pricing.

That's because it's free Christi ;)
All you need to do is join, and you'll be able to see the "reading" tab in the upper toolbar. Here's a video to help demonstrate reading; we don't have a proper FAQ yet, but please feel free to message me at the site after you join. I'm leosmith there too.


Wow, that's cool! I'm going to try it out and will get back to you about it!
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2020 resolution words learned: 472 / 1000
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leosmith
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Instant Lessons!

Postby leosmith » Tue May 21, 2019 6:46 pm

We've added instant lesson to LT. Teachers who are available for instant lessons will show up on the dashboard. Italki used to have this feature, but they got rid of it recently. That's too bad, because I took over 200 instant lessons there before they killed it.

There still aren't many teachers on LT because we're pretty new. Between one and two hundred I think. But if you'd like to use instant lessons with your current teachers, they are welcome to join. It's a pretty easy process. I like to see who's online in my skype contacts, then ask them to log on LT so we can do an instant lesson :lol:

As a reminder, we have free chat that is specifically designed for language exchange. It's based on Hellolingo, which used to be the most active instant language exchange site online, but sadly was retired recently.
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Axon
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Re: Instant Lessons!

Postby Axon » Wed May 22, 2019 1:44 am

leosmith wrote:We've added instant lesson to LT. Teachers who are available for instant lessons will show up on the dashboard. Italki used to have this feature, but they got rid of it recently. That's too bad, because I took over 200 instant lessons there before they killed it.

There still aren't many teachers on LT because we're pretty new. Between one and two hundred I think. But if you'd like to use instant lessons with your current teachers, they are welcome to join. It's a pretty easy process. I like to see who's online in my skype contacts, then ask them to log on LT so we can do an instant lesson :lol:

As a reminder, we have free chat that is specifically designed for language exchange. It's based on Hellolingo, which used to be the most active instant language exchange site online, but sadly was retired recently.


You don't have to be very specific if you don't want to, but Hellolingo posted some rather shocking numbers about how much they were spending on maintaining the website vs how much was projected to come in if there had been donations, premium membership, etc. Six figures vs three figures. All the other live chat language exchange sites have met similar fates. Is there hope that Language Tools will avoid that?
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Flickserve
Orange Belt
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Re: Language Tools

Postby Flickserve » Wed May 22, 2019 3:44 am

We've added instant lesson to LT. Teachers who are available for instant lessons will show up on the dashboard


thank you
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leosmith
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Re: Instant Lessons!

Postby leosmith » Wed May 22, 2019 6:16 am

Axon wrote:You don't have to be very specific if you don't want to, but Hellolingo posted some rather shocking numbers about how much they were spending on maintaining the website vs how much was projected to come in if there had been donations, premium membership, etc. Six figures vs three figures. All the other live chat language exchange sites have met similar fates. Is there hope that Language Tools will avoid that?

It's a fair question because I understand some people don't want to get too involved with a site that's not going to last. I believe the numbers Hellolingo posted. I could be wrong, but I would guess about 3/4 of that went to marketing. I think what he did was try to make his site grow really fast, and believe that high marketing budget would pay off and give him sales that would at least support the site. When he realized it wouldn't work, he could have cut his marketing off completely and had a very low cost to run the site. But there would still have been a cost, and I read that he wants to spend more time with his family and such, so I completely understand his decision. I wish he had been willing to sell, but that's another story.

LT tried the high marketing budget method for a few months, and it wasn't working so I discontinued it. We're still doing a lot of development right now, but that will drop off dramatically in a few months, and the site will be pretty cheap to run after that. I won't spend significantly more money on advertising than I'm receiving in revenue in the future. I'd like to break even but it's not the end of the world if it doesn't happen; definitely not in it for the money. And I don't need to spend much time doing administrative stuff, so I wouldn't close it down because I'm too busy. I use the site a lot, which is high motivation to keep it running smoothly.
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https://languagecrush.com/reading - try our free multi-language reading tool

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leosmith
Brown Belt
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Re: Instant Lessons!

Postby leosmith » Fri May 24, 2019 1:06 am

Hashimi wrote:
leosmith wrote:LT tried the high marketing budget method for a few months, and it wasn't working so I discontinued it.


Today I've seen a Facebook ad for LT, and I opened the link. So I think it's still working :D

Nice! My head developer is trying his hand at marketing, and his self-imposed rule is to start with a small amount and not spend more until we're getting that back in lesson sales.
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