localfiles0007

Hi, everybody, and this is Benny, from fluentin3months.com. And have I got a treat for you today. I'd like to introduce to you a completely free and open-source language learning system called "Learning With Texts". And it's an amazing... It's fantastic system I've been using for the last couple of weeks to help me to read some languages. So have a look at this. This is the basic interface you've got on it. It's very straightforward to use, and you can check out the links below for a full explanation. What I'm going to do today is run through very quickly a little demo of how I've been using it. So basically, let's say I've been reading -- I've been reading some Irish texts recently, and I want to add a new text. So, I click "My Text" and "New Text" and you got a blanket face here. What you do is you look for some content in your target language content online. And this can be very easy to find in a lot of situations because you can copy the text from a news web page, or a foreign language blog, or the lyrics of a song you like. Whatever it is, you just take that text, you paste it in here. So, I'm going to paste in this article, which I got from the website "byo.ie". And this is an article about social networking, but it's written in Irish. So, it can help me to learn. And I click "Save and Open", and now, here is the interface. Thus everything happens within. Something interesting you'll notice is within the text that it's copied, there are certain things highlighted and certain things that aren't. Because I've used this already a couple of times, the system starts to learn what languages -- sorry -- what words I've already learned or I definitely know, and it doesn't highlight them anymore. And it does highlight words that I haven't come across yet. And the more you use this -- If you've got an intermediate level of the language, when you use this five or six times, that blue amount will go down very quickly and you'll just have the particular terms highlighted. If you're starting off with a language, it'll be great because it'll -- it'll remove the words that you've definitely learned already. So, looking at this, you can see about a half of them have been highlighted because I haven't used this system that much in Irish yet. These are words I haven't come across yet. And there are so many yellows. So, if I click this yellow one -- This is a word that I've already added to the system from a previous learning session. And this is just a word user. So, the great thing about this is when you click the word, it will actually give you a translation within this window. So, if I click this word here, at "chapton" [ph], you'll see that at the bottom right, I have a dictionary come up. And this is the dictionary for -- that I've associated with this language. And I got lots of examples that I can use from that. And at the top right is a place where I can add this language to the list of words I want to study. And I'll get to that in a couple of minutes. So, when I'm finished reading the whole text, I would click "I know all", and I would have already selected the top words that I want to study later. And everything else, I got a good idea. And it would get rid of those blue highlights for future texts. So, the system improves with time. Now, I've been showing this to you on my computer screen here. Buying on a -- take advantage of the fact that it is a mobile system, that's it's on the internet. I want to show it to you on my iPad. Now, I've tried to use my iPad to read foreign languages, but it can be a little tricky sometimes because Safari isn't the best browser. So, if you want to look up a word, and open up a new window, it starts to get a little bit complicated sometimes. But let me show you this. This is a text I've got in Spanish. Now, you'll see, there's something added here because when I was adding it to the database, I also -- there was an option to add in audio. So, if it's a news broadcast on radio with the text attached, you can follow that along. Or if you're learning the lyrics of a song you like, you can attach the song in. You'd have to put it on -- You have to upload it yourself. So, a great website is DropBox. Just drop it in there; you'll immediately get the link and you put that into the system. And that means that within the browser, you just press "Play". [Background music playing] So, this is the song that I'm trying to learn the lyrics of. [Background music playing] So, you can follow the lyrics, if you like, along with the audio. But the best part is, let's say you come to words you don't know -- So, for example, "almas" -- Let's say I don't know what that is. I click it. And you see here on the right-hand side -- Oh, sorry. Yes, on the right-hand side, it goes to the dictionary that you have referenced. So, I happen to like WordReference for Spanish but you can do that for whatever dictionary you like as you're setting up the language. And all that's explained in the set-up procedure. So, I can see here that this word means "soul". Okay, that's great. But let's say I wanted to know what does the whole sentence mean you've actually got an option here to look up the whole sentence on Google Translate. And there you have it. So, it says here "but when there's a meeting of two souls," "it brings light." So, it brings light. You get the kind of general gist. So, what it means is you can be in the middle of reading your text, but you don't have to be going to other windows. You've got the little window here that's always going to be your dictionary that you can reference what it means. So, you don't lose track of how things are going. And now, back up here Let's say that I've decided, "Okay, so the word 'almas', "I want to add that to my dictionary--" So, I know what it means now. I know it means "souls". So, I'm going to translation here, and I type it out. "Souls" And you add a difficulty level. So, for me, that's kind of easy. So, I say 4, but you say 1. And these are also the colors. So, that'll be the color that is highlighted in future sessions. You say save, and then, that is now added to your words database. And you can see that it's highlighted in your text. So, you can access it quicker. And you can see the context of the sentence that it's in when you're accessing that. So, that alone is very good. It's a quick access to a dictionary and it keeps track of words that you're learning. But what I really like is there are so many features of it. One of the features is that you can export those words, or phrases, or terms that you're learning. And you can import the result to a spaced repetition system. My favorite one is called Anki. So, if I show you, for example, on my android, I use AnkiDroid. If you have a chain-broken iPhone or iPod, it's a free app that you can download from Cydia. Or if you have a non-chain broken one you can access the system via Wi-Fi or 3G on the website for free. I'll explain all that below. So, this would be from the Irish text that I've been looking at before. And if I start reviewing, what it does is it gives you the full sentence with a blank and a translation, or you can change the way this would work to just give you the one word. And you see that, and I'm thinking, "What's the word for 'passage'," I think it was "passage", or something like this You press "Show Answer", and yes, "pasaiste". So, that comes up highlighted. And if you think that was good or easy, you press that. And then, you go on, and so on. This is separate. This is not part of "Learning with Text". But the fact that it creates this database means you can use it in such a system. So, it's very, very cool, and I really hope you're going to check it out. Just try it a couple of times; copy and paste some text from the target language that you're learning And before you know it, you'll actually -- It's a very motivating system because the more you use it you start to see the words highlighted differently. And it starts to build up a database of how much you know in the language. And you can export it for basics. You can use it for phrases to export text to read on your mobile And there's actually also a mobile version of the system, which I can show you here if I bring up my browser. So, this is "Learning with Texts". This is the same website as before. It's the fluentin3months.com/, or fi3m.com/lwt. And you can see the list of languages I'm learning. So, if I go back into Spanish, there's the song "Vos Aves". And you got a kind of a similar thing here. You've got all of the words that you can access. It's not as good as the full system, but because you've got a mobile version you can use that just as easily. So, it's a pretty extensive system. There's a lot of things to it. But since it's completely free and it's a really, really cool way to learn how to improve your reading abilities. And to help you more in the popularity [ph] of your target language, I highly recommend you give it a try. So, once again, that's fi3m.com/lwt. And there is a dedicated section in the forum, fi3m.com/forum. There's a dedicated section to "Learning with Texts". If you've any questions, just ask them. Ask them there, we'd be happy to help you out. And otherwise, let me know in the comments below if you're enjoying using the system. If there are any bug or whatever, I'd get on them immediately. We'd try to tweak it and fix it up. And because it's open source, more features will be added by other people. So, check it out, and let me know what you think. Thanks for watching.