The other day the editor of Lingro contacted me asking for comments on his site, which describes as a multilingual online dictionary and language learning site.
The dictionary part can be used to look up words in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Polish. You can also open a webpage, Word doc, PDF or text file within the dictionary and look up any of the words by clicking on them. This brings up a pop up with translations of the words, and definitions in some cases. Here’s an example of one of Omniglot’s pages in the English-Spanish dictionary – you can change the language combination at the bottom of the screen.
You can save the words you look up in a personal wordlist, which you can peruse later to check if you remember them. There are some virtual flashcards you can use to help you with this in the games section. You can also edit words and add definitions.
Hm, I like the site. Maybe I’m going to use it in the future.
The most appealing about it, I think, is that there is no copy-pasting involved but just double clicking a word :-).
It’s addicting! I hope they add more languages soon.
There’s a great popup vocabulary program for Japanese called Rikai. You can paste the address of a Japanese site of your preference onto a text box on Rikai’s page. Click on GO, and the page of your chosen website reloads onto Rikai. Then, as you pass your mouse over the vocabulary, most of the words instantly show a translation popup window. You don’t even have to click. The pronunciation is written in hiragana (the phonetic syllabary in Japanese), so you need to be able to master those 50 letters if you want to know the pronunciation of the word… but if you don’t know hiragana, you will still get the English translation of the words. It’s a lot of fun, and a good way to complement your studies of Japanese, because you can paste pages from websites that pertain to your own interest. I chose a Japanese ceramic site this morning. So as not to attract robots to Omniglot’s blog here, I’m spelling the address instead of providing the direct link. It is rikai dot com. If you have trouble getting there, just Google the word rikai, and you’ll find it.