Show HN: Lexical.io – A web app for reading English text
lexical.io
lexical.io
I created lexical.io as way to learn more about web programming. You'll notice some rough edges as it's my first 'big' project, but for now I'm happy with how it is and I hope some of you find it useful.
The idea is similar to sites like readlang.com, where you submit a text and then can click on words for more information. Wikipedia and Wiktionary are the two sources of data, plus a number of additional audio recordings. There is an option to select your native language (currently 8 languages are supported) and then lexical.io will return Wiktionary translations and Wikipedia abstracts in that language. I can vouch that it works quite well for Spanish and German, but for languages like Korean with smaller amounts of data it may be less effective.
Given more time I would like to add more languages and potentially include target languages beyond English. There are many other features and improvements to be made, but first I'd like to see what people think. Any feedback is appreciated!
(P.S. I haven't had time to record a screencast video explaining the features, so right now the video on the about page is a dead link)
My parents who are not native English speakers would love something like this in their native language Hindi.
It would be nice to have been able to select a full sentence and see how people would say it. I understand that right now you are getting this read on a word by word basis.
The word "bickering" did not trigger any voice so I am assuming this is one rough edge to look into.
My dad just ordered a $150 (Indian rupee equivalent) book from a local company when things like this would make the learning so much simpler.
I am going to send this to my parents and see what they say.
Thank you for doing this project.
It looks like there is no recording for the word "bickering" yet. There are around 15,000 audio recordings -- some from Wiktionary and some recorded by myself working off a word frequency list. But, since English has so many morphological forms ("bickering", "bickered", "bickers", etc.) it's hard to get full coverage.