Motivation
Learning a new language is hard. It takes an enormous amount of effort to get to a base level and an equal or greater amount of effort to master. Unlike the the skill of riding a bike, fluidity with a foreign language can grow rusty and unusable after years of neglect. We must fit language practice into our daily routines.
This is not as easy as it sounds. We live in a busy world where time is the scarcest resource. Between our careers, social lives and other obligations, it's hard to find the any time to spend on learning. It becomes a choice between spending our valuable free time doing what we feel like at the moment or spending those minutes with an open book studying.
Studying language using books is such a dreadfully manual process now. We scribble down notes after looking up words in a dictionary, study, go back to our notes and repeat. Also, often times the only books in this foreign language that are available in our country are textbooks filled with stories that do not interest us in the slightest. The whole process is just so long, dreadful and hopeless.
Goals
I set out to build the LangLadder jetpack project to make learning a foreign language more enjoyable by reducing two common obstacles.
1.) Eliminate the choice between free time and language learning by merging the two. According to a December 2009 research study, an average net user surfs the web 13 hours per week excluding email. That is almost 2 hours on the web per day reading news and blogs about sports, politics, gossip, entertainment, technology, etc. Many of these same stories are reprinted in almost every language on Earth.
2.)Secondly, I automate many of the incredibly boring repetitive chores involved in language learning. I provide a language translation tool (google translate), built in search suggestions in foreign and native languages, a bookmark tool, and a flashcard tool that keeps track of flashcard quiz performance. All this combined makes reading a foreign web page a lot less awful.
This is not meant to be a full scale language learning platform. It is simply meant to be an intelligent tool to assist intermediate/advanced students of languages by providing contextual vocabulary related to their particular area of interest.
Personal Background
Hi, I'm Erik Larson and I built langladder because I wanted a plugin like it to use to learn spanish but but none existed. As luck would have it, the mozilla foundation was holding a competition called Jetpack For Learning. I entered into the compeition and after a month of banging my head against the wall learning web development, Langladder was selected as one of the ten finalists. They flew my down to attend a design camp and SXSW interactive. The experience has been great and I am extremely grateful to the mozilla foundation.
Updates
I have been blown away by the interest of langladder. People have been downloading the plugin from all over the globe. I am trying to figure out the best mechanism to get feedback about what you all think so far of the plugin (bug reports, feature requests, etc). I am in the process of creating an email account. Also langladder now supports many new languages.
Install
How to Use
LangLadder Screencast from Erik Larson on Vimeo.