Language Tools

Language tools, founded by Leo Smith, is a site which provides various useful learning through reading and writing tools.

The tools are free and there is a community which provides free exchange of language and skills too. Users are, however, regularly encouraged to pay for language lessons from onsite teachers and I guess that’s where the site covers its costs.

The reading tool looks like this:

It is set up so that TTS is optional for individual words. Top right is the audio for the segment as a whole, and it is done at an amateur standard. The audio we’ve done so far for LARA is superior. The ‘normal’ speed is quite slow and the half speed is not usable. 

As you can see, it has lots of LARA sorts of ideas in it, including the idea of a community and it may well be worth looking at how it does some things.

The site’s ‘write and correct’ tool is entirely unautomated, one enters something one has written and hope that you get competent feedback from the community:

The site states that ‘All profits after operating expenses and development costs go to support our charity project in Tanzania, Africa: the Woyode school in Africa, an elementary school for the Masaai children.’

It brings to mind that LARA has to address how costs are going to be covered in the long term. One suggestion I had was that we could ask users to donate if they wished to, and that monies received would be used as necessary, with surplus going to the development of content for minority languages. Worth discussing further?