A Journey in Languages

quasicandid:

foreveralinguist:

plumbroth:

a very useful thing! install this on firefox:

you can highlight a word (it’s best to use the root i think and not catch the inflection endings), and put in some kind of note (ex. a meaning in english). that way in the future whenever you see that word online, the word will be highlighted and your note will exist. you can remove it later, so that if you memorize a word and don’t need the hints anymore, you can get rid of it. (to add a word or phrase, highlight it then right-click. to edit or remove, right-click on a yellow word without you highlighting it yourself). you can also export a big list of your notes to use them with something else.

it’s a good way to track your progress, because you can add a note every time you see a new word, and take screenshots once a month or so of random pages with lots of text, to show how many words are there that you don’t know, and watch them decrease over time!!

some people have trouble where it crashes firefox, in that case, just deactivate the tool when you are not reading any swedish and activate it when you plan to read some. you can of course use it for totally unrelated things, like highlighting people’s usernames and making notes to remember where/how you met them and what they are like….

xxx some things i didn’t realise immediately:
you CAN add multiple highlighter colours, to ex. have one colour be for vocab and one colour be for phrases. to do this, right-click on a word (without it being highlighted) and go to “vocabulary highlighter”. a menu will pop up like in the above images. (you can also click the red highlighter button here, to turn on/off highlighting overall) if you make any changes in this menu, it appears after you close the menu, not instantly. for me the menu has no close option so i have to restart firefox every time.

click on “pens, customize pens”. from there you can click the plus button to add a new pen, and you can change the colour of the pen. (i have one colour for vocab and one for phrases, but if i decide to make pens for other languages then i will give each language its own vocabulary pen.) on the options there, “only highlight matches having left/right boundaries” means that a “right word boundary” means there is a letter after the term in the highlight notes (like “cat” and then “caterpillar”. if you have this checked, then cat will be highlighted but nothing in caterpillar will be.) Likewise “left boundary” means if something is touching and before the highlighted word, such as “tomcat”.

for Swedish, it is not practical to have either of those checked because Swedish is made up of roots combined to make words (less than some other languages, but still!). if you have a word like “caterpillar” and have “pillar” already in the vocab but want to have “caterpillar” also a vocab word, when you add “caterpillar”, if you hover over the “cater” part it will show the definition for “caterpillar”, but if you hover over the “pillar” it shows the definition for “pillar”. So i would advise to learn words in their root chunks and only put a highlight over a full word like that if it is really necessary. but that is just my opinion, and especially if you don’t know almost any swedish then maybe you will need to do it differently than me (i can easily tell when something is a compound word or not, is what i mean, and i can ignore highlighted bits that i know are just coincidence).

in the beginning of course you may be frustrated thinking that there are so many words to add, and especially if a lot of words have root spelling changes. (if you have a list already, you can import your list to this app so it reads it). but it starts getting easier really fast, especially because you can open any webpage and see words you have already highlighted (depending on your swedish level). i am also adding in words i understand a few meanings of but not all.

Omg! This looks great; I use Chrome a lot right now but I’m tempted to switch to Firefox for reading if I can use this :D

I saw this and searched through the Chrome extensions and found LinguaLeo. It lets you enter your own notes so it’s kind of a similar thing, but it’s designed for learning English and/or portuguese, and the website and options are all in Portuguese or Russian ..?

Another option is Simple Highlighter which is a more versatile tool for highlighting, making brief notes, and looking things up. It has a translating option as well.

Aha! Thank you :) I looked at LinguaLeo but yes, that was very confusing, so I’ve downloaded the Simple Highlighter instead (amongst other things; once I was on the Chrome webstore, I couldn’t get off of it). I’ve downloaded the one for Firefox too though, so I can see how they compare. Thank you for letting me know about the Chrome extension :D

plumbroth:

a very useful thing! install this on firefox:

you can highlight a word (it’s best to use the root i think and not catch the inflection endings), and put in some kind of note (ex. a meaning in english). that way in the future whenever you see that word online, the word will be highlighted and your note will exist. you can remove it later, so that if you memorize a word and don’t need the hints anymore, you can get rid of it. (to add a word or phrase, highlight it then right-click. to edit or remove, right-click on a yellow word without you highlighting it yourself). you can also export a big list of your notes to use them with something else.

it’s a good way to track your progress, because you can add a note every time you see a new word, and take screenshots once a month or so of random pages with lots of text, to show how many words are there that you don’t know, and watch them decrease over time!!

some people have trouble where it crashes firefox, in that case, just deactivate the tool when you are not reading any swedish and activate it when you plan to read some. you can of course use it for totally unrelated things, like highlighting people’s usernames and making notes to remember where/how you met them and what they are like….

xxx some things i didn’t realise immediately:
you CAN add multiple highlighter colours, to ex. have one colour be for vocab and one colour be for phrases. to do this, right-click on a word (without it being highlighted) and go to “vocabulary highlighter”. a menu will pop up like in the above images. (you can also click the red highlighter button here, to turn on/off highlighting overall) if you make any changes in this menu, it appears after you close the menu, not instantly. for me the menu has no close option so i have to restart firefox every time.

click on “pens, customize pens”. from there you can click the plus button to add a new pen, and you can change the colour of the pen. (i have one colour for vocab and one for phrases, but if i decide to make pens for other languages then i will give each language its own vocabulary pen.) on the options there, “only highlight matches having left/right boundaries” means that a “right word boundary” means there is a letter after the term in the highlight notes (like “cat” and then “caterpillar”. if you have this checked, then cat will be highlighted but nothing in caterpillar will be.) Likewise “left boundary” means if something is touching and before the highlighted word, such as “tomcat”.

for Swedish, it is not practical to have either of those checked because Swedish is made up of roots combined to make words (less than some other languages, but still!). if you have a word like “caterpillar” and have “pillar” already in the vocab but want to have “caterpillar” also a vocab word, when you add “caterpillar”, if you hover over the “cater” part it will show the definition for “caterpillar”, but if you hover over the “pillar” it shows the definition for “pillar”. So i would advise to learn words in their root chunks and only put a highlight over a full word like that if it is really necessary. but that is just my opinion, and especially if you don’t know almost any swedish then maybe you will need to do it differently than me (i can easily tell when something is a compound word or not, is what i mean, and i can ignore highlighted bits that i know are just coincidence).

in the beginning of course you may be frustrated thinking that there are so many words to add, and especially if a lot of words have root spelling changes. (if you have a list already, you can import your list to this app so it reads it). but it starts getting easier really fast, especially because you can open any webpage and see words you have already highlighted (depending on your swedish level). i am also adding in words i understand a few meanings of but not all.

Omg! This looks great; I use Chrome a lot right now but I’m tempted to switch to Firefox for reading if I can use this :D