
Show HN: Readlang – Learn a language while you surf the web - steveridout
http://readlang.com/
======
steveridout
Creator of the Readlang here. I started this at the very end of 2012, and save
for a few months contracting have been working on it full time since, doing
everything myself. Growth has been slower than I’d like but _just enough_ to
keep me motivated.

It's a freemium webapp, originally designed to reduce the frustration of
practicing my Spanish by reading novels, and later adapted to work on any
webpage as a browser extension.

I always appreciate it when people share details about their business, so here
are some numbers from the first 5 months of 2015 (Jan - May):

Google Analytics - Sessions: 120,000, Unique visitors: 53,489

Signups - 13,658

Revenue - $4768 (average of $953 / month)

Not spectacular, but when I look back, it took 16 months to make the first
$1000 ([http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-
bootstrapped-l...](http://steveridout.com/2014/03/22/readlang-my-bootstrapped-
language-learning-web-app.html)), and right now it’s making more than that
every month! It’s a long road but I’m very excited about it’s future.

Any questions or feedback, please fire away!

~~~
pbiggar
I'm vaguely trying to learn spanish using Duolingo, but haven't been very
diligent. I was hoping your chrome extension could be a more passive way of
learning that integrates into what I already do, and which would let me stick
with it as a result.

Unfortunately, the current version isn't. Unless I'm using it wrong, here's
the process of learning spanish with your extension:

    
    
        - I'm on a page
        - I decide to learn spanish
        - I click the extension button
        - i click random words and see the spanish word for it
    

There's a lot of friction (I have to steps 2 and 3) for not a lot of pay off
(I can choose to click words and see what the spanish version is). Also, the
fact that it gets in the way of every link means I immediately turned it off.

May I suggest an alternate version:

    
    
        - on every single page the extension is active
        - pick some number of words (1% maybe?) to translate into spanish, while keeping the text in english. Underline them in green and let me mouseover if I don't understand
        - when I'm reading the text, I will come across these spanish words and learn them in context
    

Much lower friction, and doesn't get in the way so I won't turn it off.

WDYT?

~~~
Nadya
So something like this?

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-
immersion...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion-
for-ch/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl)

~~~
pbiggar
Yes, awesome, thanks! It doesn't get the translations perfect AFAICT, but I
think it's good enough to keep activated!

~~~
StavrosK
Unfortunately, I don't think you can learn, for example, Spanish by
translating pages _to_ Spanish. You have to read pages in Spanish and
translate _from_ it, otherwise you're learning Google-Translatese, not
Spanish.

There's a lot of nuance, idioms, etc that translations can't give you, not to
mention that they're usually, very, very wrong.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
At least personally, I've always been horrible at remembering nouns/verbs in
Spanish. I never did listen to any of my teachers and spend time memorizing
the 10 or so words per week that I was supposed to. Even still I don't listen
to Duolingo and practice consistently.

My lack of vocabulary is directly related to my conversational fluency. It
would definitely be nice to randomly see Spanish words in an English sentence
while I'm going about my day. Next time I'm trying to speak to someone in
Spanish, I may remember some of these words, be more confident about my
sentences, and keep the conversation going longer. Honestly, even if I use the
words slightly incorrectly (because they are Googleese) at least I'll have
said something and have more conversation experience to learn from.

------
kevin
There’s a lot to like here. It reminds me of this great article I read about
someone learning French by reading Harry Potter many years ago. I can’t find
the first reference to it, but it seems a lot of people take this approach now
and numerous articles have been written about this method.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=harry+potter+language+learni...](https://www.google.com/search?q=harry+potter+language+learning)

I was delighted to see that you even wrote about it yourselves on your blog.
[http://blog.readlang.com/2014/03/08/learn-languages-with-
har...](http://blog.readlang.com/2014/03/08/learn-languages-with-harry-
potter.html)

Your content marketing is great, but you don’t do it enough. Good startups
ship both code and marketing efforts on a regular basis…ideally, you should
shoot for something going out weekly.

It’s great that you shared your numbers, but snapshots are less helpful than
data or information that shows momentum. When I’m trying to figure out if a
company is doing well, numbers at a fixed point in time usually isn’t enough
data to help me determine what the company looks like in the future.

Early stage startups should try for at least 10%/weekly growth on your core
metric. If you’re not hitting that, make sure you’re only spending time/energy
on tasks to hit those numbers.

Onboarding experience can use some work. There’s not enough guidance in the
app to make me feel confident that I can use your site to learn a language on
my own. For instance, when I first login, I had no idea what I was supposed to
do first.

[http://cl.ly/image/253K373i1M2Y](http://cl.ly/image/253K373i1M2Y)

Even though I saw Upload Text button and the Web Reader link/button…I
naturally clicked on the first story…which lead me to a page with even less
guidance. I’ve never learned a language by reading and I couldn't find any
help for best practices to using your site or how I’m supposed to turn this
exposure into language proficiency.

Highly recommend reading Kathy Sierra’s article about how learning isn’t a
push model. Might give you some ideas:
[http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2004/1...](http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2004/12/learning_isnt_a.html)

The highlight to translate UX feels promising, but I found myself wanting a
way to see the full english text side by side with the translated portion.

Why make me click twice to learn words through the flashcard interface? (tab
then button) Also, if you want me to do it everyday, offer me a daily email or
sms to practice. Each one of those emails is an opportunity to upgrade them
down the road.

[http://cl.ly/image/343r002E071K](http://cl.ly/image/343r002E071K)

Speaking of upgrade triggers, it sure feels like you make it hard to upgrade
or pay right away right from the get go. I think it’s because you’re shooting
to upgrade people who are using it the most. That seems way too nice. :)

As far as your feature list is concerned on the marketing side…they feel very
YOU centric rather than USER centric.
[http://readlang.com/features](http://readlang.com/features)

I have to do all this work to figure out why the feature is better for me. If
the copy is one step removed from me selling myself, it’ll be two steps
removed from me being able to sell it to a friend.

Here’s a link to another Kathy Sierra article talking about focusing on
helping users kick ass over showing off how you kick ass (she’s the best).
[http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0...](http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/05/users_dont_care.html)

I see on this page that you do have daily reminder email for flashcards…funny,
I never found it when I was playing with it.

Anyway, hope this helps. Keep up the good work!

~~~
steveridout
Thanks very much, this is great advice!

(It's 4am here now and my brain is fried so will go through this in detail
tomorrow.)

~~~
StavrosK
Any plans for Bitcoin integration? My preferred methods of payment are, in
order of preference, Bitcoin, PayPal and credit card as a distant last.

~~~
steveridout
Sorry, no plans at the moment. It still seems too niche to be worth adding.

Would love to hear if anyone has achieved significant increase in payments
after adding bitcoin in addition to paypal & credit card.

------
sethjgore
Great work here! I wonder if you'd be interested in some form of integration.

I'm a partner at [http://green-bridge.org](http://green-bridge.org) and we've
been bootstrapping our stuff for a year now. It's a tool used for over 15
years in the classroom but we only just begun to bring business aspect to it.
Grmmr shows visually the grammar of English (we're slowly expanding onto other
languages). We're focused just on the grammar aspect of things.

You have exactly what we were planning on building. We would love to add our
shapes atop of the translations so it's easier to visualize. A lot of schools
and ESL groups in colleges use our tools and they definitely will benefit from
using your stuff along with our visuals.

Let me know if this is something you might be interested in.

~~~
steveridout
Looks cool! Some of it seems very intuitive, like the arrow pointing back to
indicate the past, or the double arrow to indicate plural. I could imagine a
set of symbols like this being a very nice addition to a dictionary allowing
fast identification of the part of speech and conjugation.

My TODO list is already way too long with core Readlang stuff to do this kind
of integration at the moment, currently I don't even detect whether a word is
a noun, verb, etc. It's all handled by google and the external dictionaries. I
look forward to following your progress though. Good luck!

------
microcolonel
I use Rikaichan (which works really well for Japanese, not sure about other
languages as I've not tried) It covers a significant portion of this in my
opinion. The original is for Firefox, but there's also a chrome port under the
name "rikaikun".

That said, I'll take a look at this, maybe it's cool. :-)

~~~
steveridout
I think for Japanese, Rikaichan probably beats Readlang right now because it
can detect word boundaries, and probably has other features specific to
Japanese that I can't afford to spend time on with Readlang yet.

It would be awesome to improve Japanese support later after it's achieved
success with the main European languages.

~~~
microcolonel
Yeah, I took a look at your Japanese mode, and while I'm impressed that it
works at all, it has some problems with Japanese's high concentration of
homographs and homonyms.

First thing I ran into (second character in the text!) was 月, in this case it
was part of 夕月(approximately "evening moon"), but it separated the two
characters and translated 月 statically as "month" instead of "moon", which it
meant in this case.

This stuff can be hard, I've tried for myself and honestly, I'm not up to the
task unless I can make a living at it.

------
remarkEon
Watched the videos to fully understand what this is and wow, just wow. I used
to be fluent in Spanish and lost it years ago for lack of use but this is
going to be an easy way for me to catch up seeing as how I read so much during
the day. Congrats, this is an amazing project.

------
xiaq
I tried German, where the first text is the German version of Let It Go, and
there are quite some mistakes in the text (wrong capitalization, wrong
spaces). Even more evident when the YouTube video itself actually contains the
text.

Is the text user-generated?

~~~
steveridout
Yes, the texts are uploaded and synchronized by users. I should really add a
way to easily flag up mistakes and contribute corrections.

------
jcoffland
I like the idea of doing two things at once but you often end up doing both
things poorly. There's a high likelyhood that you will learn somethings
incorrectly due to machine translation errors, even in popular languages. For
other language combinations, English-Chineese for example, Google translate is
really bad. Frequent and repeated exposure to a language is the best way to
learn. This product could help but learning a language is like loosing weight,
there aren't really any short cuts. You still have to work hard.

~~~
steveridout
Learning a language is going to take a lot of time and effort, no argument
there.

But not all methods are equally effective so anything that reduces the time or
effort required, even if just by 10%, is technically a 'short cut'. And
anything that increases your enjoyment of the process is a win, regardless of
whether it saves time, since it will help maintain motivation. Losing
motivation is surely the most common reason people fail to learn.

The main idea here is to reduce the friction of reading as much as possible,
freeing up your attention to focus on understanding and enjoying the text. The
machine translation is only used here for words and short phrases, where it's
more effective than for complete sentences.

(I'll take your word for it that google translate isn't so good with English-
Chinese, I'm mainly focussed on the European languages for now)

------
tat45
I can't select more than 3 or so words at a time before being bugged to go
premium, and some words refuse to translate altogether, just bringing up the
"go premium" box.

Neat idea though.

~~~
steveridout
If you select 2 adjacent words it will try to combine them into a phrase and
you only get 10 phrases / day for free on the free plan. You get unlimited
single words for free though so you CAN continue using it heavily without
paying if you like, it's just not quite as useful.

~~~
vegasje
Have you played with this number at all? 10 phrases per day seems awfully low
in my mind. If I was to download this extension, I would want to use it for a
day or two before paying for an upgrade. I imagine you hit 10 phrases quite
quickly, and this might turn some people off of the product before they fall
in love.

~~~
steveridout
You could be right. It used to be 20 for free, but I lowered it so that more
people would actually hit the limit and get the "Go Premium" message. It's
hard to know what the optimal number should be. For a while I had a split test
running where some users had 5, some 10, and some 20 per day. But there
weren't enough users to see a significant difference in conversions.

~~~
appleflaxen
I think the sweet spot is probably closer to 100... you want people to see how
great it is when they use it a lot.

------
imaginenore
Isn't Google translate API horrible at actually translating? Both me and my
wife are bilingual, and GT goes full retard for any non-trivial sentence for
both of us.

~~~
steveridout
It's actually pretty good as far as machine translation goes. For long complex
sentences it can be misleading, but the use case here is to translate words
and short phrases good enough for you to understand the meaning and enjoy the
text, and for that purpose it works well 95% of the time. For the other 5%,
you can usually tell from the context that it's not correct, and there's a
popup/sidebar dictionary you can refer to. Please give it a try and let me
know if you think it's useful or not.

------
jonathansizz
How to you avoid falling foul of Google's 'unusual activity' algorithms?

There's another extension (Language Immersion for Chrome) that could've been
great - it's designed to be used during regular browsing in your own language,
and translates a user-defined proportion of words from your language into your
target language. Unfortunately, it only works for a few pages before being
blocked.

~~~
steveridout
Not sure what unusual activity you're referring to, I pay for their translate
API - I don't know how Language Immersion works but perhaps they are getting
around paying for the API by loading a hidden version of the google translate
page and scraping it - that's pure conjecture though!

------
hobo_mark
I am saving aggressively to do the same in two years.

How hard is it to get out and be social while literally everybody else is
working at a 'real' job?

~~~
steveridout
Not that hard! One trick is to move to a cheaper part of the world, I'm
currently spending most of my time in Madrid which is a lot cheaper than my
old home of London, so socialising is easy financially. The tougher problem
has been pushing through and continuing when the usage has decreased for 2
months in a row, but things always seem to turn around and improve, and as
long as things are moving in the right direction long term, I have a roof over
my head, and enjoy what I'm doing, I don't see the point in stopping. (My
thoughts may change slightly in the coming months since we have a baby on the
way!)

EDIT: slight tweak

~~~
hobo_mark
Wow, just wow...

In my mind I could never afford having a partner while still bootstrapping,
much less having a kid! That's very interesting to hear. Best of luck to you.

~~~
eseehausen
Looking back, I'm not sure I could imagine bootstrapping without having a
supportive partner. Mine was earning slightly less than me, but she covered
the insurance, so that was helpful too. Much more importantly, when there were
times that there was no time to see anyone non-business related, when I would
get buried in a problem and lost my ability to see the larger picture, and
when somebody needed to just drag me away from the computer for a bit, she was
there. Not to mention all the help on the domestic/not living like an animal
front.

It seems like some people need work, problem solving, and/or success like they
need to breathe, so their pursuit of those things seems to be enough fuel for
them to live off. For the rest of us trying to solve big or small problems, I
would say that a strong relationship is an incredibly useful asset. That's
even bracketing all the important benefits in all the non-work areas of life.

~~~
steveridout
Completely agree - I would have probably gone crazy or given up by this point
if it wasn't for my girlfriend.

------
jrcii
I use a great extension for this purpose called mingaling. It replaces words
you designate with translations when they occur on any page. So as you surf
you passively learn vocabulary.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ming-a-
ling/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ming-a-ling/)

------
aquarin
I tried to sign in with google email. The site asks to view my email
addresses. I cancel.

~~~
ljk
> _The site asks to view my email addresses._

what do you mean by that?

------
abdulhaq
Great job. A few years ago I did something very similar myself but just for
arabic - www.arabicreader.net (still running but needing some TLC) - but
didn't pursue it the same way you've done. I take my hat off to you!

------
fsiefken
Really nice, i was just looking for such a tool as i'm learning esperanto

------
ghostwriter
This is a great project. Please make the checkout page SSL-enabled only. At
the moment, the extension's "Go Premium" menu link redirects to an insecure
version of the page.

~~~
steveridout
Yikes! Thanks very much, just fixed it.

------
uptownfunk
Can I use this to improve my english vocabulary? Sometimes I read articles but
I don't know what the words mean. It would be nice if you could implement
this, if not already.

~~~
steveridout
Only if your native language is not English. There's been a uservoice
suggestion to allow it to work in monolingual mode for ages
([https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggest...](https://readlang.uservoice.com/forums/192149-general/suggestions/4030262-option-
to-not-translate)) - I've been avoiding this so far since it's a big change to
how the inline translations and flashcards would have to work.

------
iagorodriguez
Loved the tool. Congratulations. Just wondering, how do you manage the phrase
translation? It is your system learning from itself?

~~~
steveridout
I pay to use the Google Translate API, it works very well for popular
languages to/from English. Other language combinations aren't so great.

~~~
delpino73
How much you pay for that?

~~~
steveridout
It's $20 per 1M characters.

------
LiweiZ
"Learn word in context", that's what I've been working on for a long time.
Just from a different angle:)

------
edsykes
keep going with this - it's genuinely useful - you've actually automated my
language learning process.

------
nemoniac
"Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"

Srsly?

~~~
steveridout
Yep, I know it's sounds scary, but I believe it's the only way for the Web
Reader extension to work. I don't do anything malicious (just trying to upsell
you on the premium plan) but I'd completely understand if you were freaked out
by that.

An alternative is to use the bookmarklet, which will only run javascript on
those pages where you explicitly clicked to open it, it works exactly like the
extension:

[http://readlang.com/webReader](http://readlang.com/webReader)

~~~
nemoniac
I just tried it out. I take it all back.

It's absolutely awesome. I regularly read news in half a dozen languages and
this is what I've been waiting for for years now.

Awesome!

------
it_learnses
i don't see japanese

~~~
inlinevoid
Try the "More languages" dropdown when selecting a language. I think its there
near the bottom, but it's actually spelled in Japanese.

~~~
slavik81
It's also labelled as in beta. After signup, it clarifies what that means at
the bottom of the page:

> Note: Readlang has only limited support for 日本語. Words are not prioritised
> based on frequency, and texts are not graded by difficulty.

Slightly disappointing, as I really hoped they did that, but I'll probably
still give it a try. EDIT: I'm very impressed by the translation.

