Ready to boost your speed of language acquisition? LWT or Learning with Texts, is exactly what you need. It is quite similar to the popular LingQ. It allows you to have everything LingQ offers, only you can use it offline and it’s totally free. Everything is built into the same window (dictionary and the text) so you don’t have to leave the page. You also have the ability to upload audio, and check your statistics — everything you need is there. It’s usable on iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. All you need is a website to host the software or, alternatively, localhost it on your computer.
What exactly is it?
LWT is basically a software that allows you to read texts in whatever language you are learning. Whenever you come across a new word, it will be highlighted in blue, meaning it’s an unknown word. You can click on the word and it will allow you to choose the status of it. For example, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, well-known, or ignore the word. 1 meaning you don’t know it well. Each number you choose has a different color to remind you the status of that specific word. So if you set it as a 3, the word will be a light orange color. Well-known words have no color. If you ever come across one of these words in another text, they will be in that color of the status you chose.
You can also look up the word or sentence in a dictionary. The cool part about this being that it opens in the bottom right corner of the window so you never have to leave the page. This makes reading the text much quicker than having to open up another window for a translator, and flip between it.
If you have it, you can upload audio to accompany the text. Much like LingQ has audio along with its readings. This is the only slight downside as you might not be able to obtain an audio of the text while LingQ has audio for every text on the site.
How do I install it?
A big problem with this software is in its difficulty to install. If you do wish to install it locally (offline), then I recommend this article explaining how. I took the route of using it on my own website as I didn’t want to mess with installing it locally. If you have your own website with hosting, here’s how to install it.
First, download the files from http://sourceforge.net/projects/lwt/files/ and extract them somewhere on your computer. Open up whatever you use for FTP managing (I use FileZilla) and upload all the files to a new folder on the root of your site. I called my folder “lwt.” When it is done uploading, you simply visit your website like this – example.com/lwt (or whatever you named the folder)
The LWT software should now be up and running on your website for you to use.
If you do not have your own hosting then you can always use a free webhost such as 000webhost.com. LWT’s homepage has instructions on how to set it up on 000webhost.
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And that’s it. I and many other language learners recommend this software very highly. Don’t overlook it if you are serious about learning your target language!
And if you want to learn some positive words in English, you may start with our post on positive words that start with y.
Have you ever heard of learning with texts or tried this before? I would love to hear your comments below!
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