my first blog is about learning foreign languages. As you may already have guessed English is not my native language, but I decided to write in English just in order to have another language practice :)
At school I studied German. You may consider me stupid, but after 6 years of study I could hardly read some simple texts and couldn't speak German at all.
I prefer to blame my teacher for that while she couldn’t speak herself, I even believe she'd never been in Germany. All we did at lessons is just that we read some stupid dialogs which always made me boring.
After graduating from school I started to believe that foreign languages are something too hard for me. But while I learned computer science I had to read lots of documentation in English for which there was no translation.
When I began to study English for myself (about 10 years ago) I found out that adaptive reading gives best and fastest result. Already after 6 months I could easily read any documentation and some classics.
I'm not sure about the term so let me call it 'bilingual reading' or 'adaptive reading'. It means you can start reading any foreign book after you've got some basic grammar knowledge.
When I came to this idea for the first time I was deeply impressed!
The idea is that you have same text in two languages. At first you read an article in your native language, then same article in foreign language. Don't care about all unknown words, idioms or slang. Just read the text and don't stop.
After some time you begin to understand that you've learned lots of words and it cost you nothing.
Then you can try to read an article in foregn language first and understand what's there, then read a translation to be sure.
Still you don't learn words or grammar, they just come to you by and by.
Soon after you'll not need a translation any more, just occasionally look up a word or a phrase.
I found several web sites (mostly in russian) wholly devoted to bilingual reading, which provide some dozens of selected books in Microsoft Word format. I can imagine how much effort it took to produce these books!
For me it was not a solution, so I decided to make my own automated service :)
I wanted a solution which would generate bilingual documents automatically out of several translations. So I made a small website written in PHP. Almost 2 years I used it at home on my PC and I enjoyed reading my favorite books. About a year ago I finally decided to publish it on the internet so I could read from mobile phone while out from home for business..
So let me introduce http://www.weblitera.com/. Unfortunatelly international copyright law forbids to publish modern authors (living after 1950) so this website became a collection of classical literature :)
It's better than nothing and anyway there are lots of masterpieces among classics which I haven't read before (I bet you too).
Here is how bilingual reading looks like:
In this picture one column has english text and other is in spanish. If a book has several translations (lots of books have 4+ translations) it may be read in any pair of available languages.With help of Google Translator you can translate any word or sentence by hovering with a mouse pointer. Recently Google introduced Dictionary but it has no public API (yet?). I would use it when it becomes available..
ImTranslator service provides TTS (Text to Speech). Select any text and click an ImTranslator image:
Everyone interested is welcome to visit it, maybe somebody will find it helpful :)
Oh yes, currently there are about 200 original works in 7 languages (english, german, french, spanish, italian, russian and chinese), totally more that 500 translations. More coming...
Let me know if you have some great ideas how to extend this website further..
