
Show HN: Lexical.io – A web app for reading English text - trill1
https://lexical.io
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trill1
Hi HN,

I created lexical.io as way to learn more about web programming. You'll notice
some rough edges as it's my first 'big' project, but for now I'm happy with
how it is and I hope some of you find it useful.

The idea is similar to sites like readlang.com, where you submit a text and
then can click on words for more information. Wikipedia and Wiktionary are the
two sources of data, plus a number of additional audio recordings. There is an
option to select your native language (currently 8 languages are supported)
and then lexical.io will return Wiktionary translations and Wikipedia
abstracts in that language. I can vouch that it works quite well for Spanish
and German, but for languages like Korean with smaller amounts of data it may
be less effective.

Given more time I would like to add more languages and potentially include
target languages beyond English. There are many other features and
improvements to be made, but first I'd like to see what people think. Any
feedback is appreciated!

(P.S. I haven't had time to record a screencast video explaining the features,
so right now the video on the about page is a dead link)

~~~
zenincognito
Well done ! It has a very good intuitive UI to process each word.

My parents who are not native English speakers would love something like this
in their native language Hindi.

It would be nice to have been able to select a full sentence and see how
people would say it. I understand that right now you are getting this read on
a word by word basis.

The word "bickering" did not trigger any voice so I am assuming this is one
rough edge to look into.

My dad just ordered a $150 (Indian rupee equivalent) book from a local company
when things like this would make the learning so much simpler.

I am going to send this to my parents and see what they say.

Thank you for doing this project.

~~~
trill1
Thanks for trying it! Hindi is on my list for languages to add.

It looks like there is no recording for the word "bickering" yet. There are
around 15,000 audio recordings -- some from Wiktionary and some recorded by
myself working off a word frequency list. But, since English has so many
morphological forms ("bickering", "bickered", "bickers", etc.) it's hard to
get full coverage.

