Lingro: On Demand Word Translation

When you're learning a new language, there comes a time when you know about grammar structures well enough that the only thing that trips you up is new vocabulary words you haven't learned yet. For that, full translation sites are not useful, since the goal is to read in the new language while occasionally looking up certain words.

I myself have used the excellent Rikai for just this purpose when I read Japanese sites (e.g. 毎日新聞 [Mainichi News]). Rikai lets you plug in a website and it will load up the site like normal, letting you see the full Japanese. However, when you encounter a word you don't know, you simply roll over the word and a pop up window tells you the readings (for Kanji) and the definitions of the word. It's certainly helped my vocabulary acquisition quite a bit.

Lingro builds upon this concept and provides the same service for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Polish. Lingro even goes a step further and lets you add definitions for words that might not be in Lingro's dictionary (they had to add some kind of Web 2.0 functionality.)

An excellent tool for all my fellow linguaphiles out there.

Lingro: Multilingual Dictionary and Language Learning Site [Lingro]
[via: Boing Boing]