Learning With Text (LWT)

Learning With Text is a free and open source environment for reading texts in foreign languages. The programme has dictionary, translation, audio player, and vocabulary management system built-in so the process can be streamlined.

However, the code is written a long time ago and some APIs no longer work. Neither does it run in the newest version of PHP so downgrading to 5.4.45 may get it to work correctly.

@gustavklopp’s LingL is a wonderful alternative written in python if LWT is too complicated.

My personal fork is fork of @PirtleShell’s fork of @andreask7’s fork and contains some customisations detailed in this blog post.

Development for LWT started again at HugoFara’s fork!

The default French to English dictionary API no longer works for some reason. After some exploration I came up with this list of options:

• http://www.wordreference.com/fren/### (This is my default dictionary; it handles inflections quite well but can feel over-detailed)
• https://www.linguee.com/english-french/search?source=auto&query=###
• *http://translate.google.com/?ie=UTF-8&sl=fr&tl=en&text=### for google translate in new window
• https://bing.com/translator/?text=###&from=fr&to=en (This one works even in an html frame, which is why I ditched Google Translate)
• *https://de.glosbe.com/fr/en/### for opening Glosbe in new window
• dict:///### (This brings up the MacOS built-in dictionary if you are on Mac)

Documentation: https://hugofara.github.io/lwt/docs/html/index.html

Maybe it’s time. LWT is old, and its code base is hard to work with, but its approach is still unparalled by any other tool. I don’t know how hard it will be to build a better one, but I think I shall open source my vision: 2022-07-18 Towards an Integrated Content-Based Language Learning Environment - An Exploratory Proposal