Focus on verbs
Verbs are critical. Yet they are often very difficult to master, particularly abstract verbs. Verb conjugations are especially difficult, especially in irregular verbs. Quite a few Readlang suggestions and requests have addressed verbs, such as separable verbs in German and Dutch. I think it would be very helpful to have a way to focus on verbs in the text itself, not necessarily in flash cards, etc. Perhaps it could be a toggle on/off option to highlight verbs and their auxiliary verbs and separable parts. An additional feature could be a right click on highlighted verbs to bring up a pop-up window with the complete conjugation, based on something like Verbix. I believe such highlighting of, and focus on, verbs would be a big help to learn them properly. Such a feature would add a whole new dimension to understanding a language.
I agree this would be great. But implementing it for all the supported languages would be difficult.
I currently rely on Google Translate to do the hard work of translating and Readlang itself isn’t actually aware of which words are verbs, nouns, etc.
It’s unlikely I’ll be able to add this any time soon.
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Phil Somers commented
I totally understand the degree of difficulty, even in one language, let alone all the supported languages. I guess it was wishful thinking on my part. I have been looking at my weak areas in Dutch and see this approach of highlighting verbs and verb parts, combined with full conjugations, as a big asset. I have been playing around with the concept by manually highlighting verbs and using Verbix. It really is useful, especially to learn conjugations without resorting to rote learning, to better understand word order in sentences, to understand separable verbs, and verbs being pushed to the end of sentences, such as in Dutch and German. I am going to see if I can implement some software to do the highlighting using a large corpus of conjugated verbs. The process will make a few mistakes but will probably be 95% correct with the highlighting and quick access to the fully conjugated verbs.
Thanks for your continued work on Readlang. I love it. I just wish I had more time to use it.