I just tried it with French (a language I already know).. and I don't think that it's a good tool. In my opinion, you should always avoid seeing incorrect usage of language when learning. This extension does not properly translate the words in context, it does not provide the proper forms of words that correspond with the subjects/objects (such as masculine/feminine/plural), and sometimes it's completely wrong. If you learned using this tool, you'd have to unlearn almost as much material as you learned.
I think it's much, much more effective to just read a newspaper in the language you want to learn and use a dictionary. It's not as easy, but you're not going to expose yourself to bad grammar that you'll automatically pick up and have to unlearn later.
Sorry, I don't; I'd appreciate any recommendations as well!
I used to read business and tech news in French, but it was frustrating because most of the articles were rehashed from things I read hours (or days) before in English, and I try to keep the S/N ratio of my feed reader as high as possible. The feeds I read in French are mostly related to local news, European politics, music, art, cinema, local events, etc.
There was an article that was linked to here where a French tech guy (speaking in English though) gave a pretty good video blog analysis of how much the average mobile app developer makes (not much).
The problem with reading a newspaper is that you need to do something else to do that. This allows you to see words translated while goofing off on the Internet.
And obviously it's not a perfect tool, but it's great to learn assorted new nouns and things like that. I've learned a few things in German since I turned it on.
Good point, but I'd recommend watching out for mistranslations, otherwise when speaking/writing German, the wrong word is going to come up, and you're going to have to be corrected several times before you are able to naturally find the correct word. In my experience, it's much harder to unlearn a mistake than to learn correctly the first time.
For learning without having to do something else, I'd recommend:
* Turning on subtitles in the target language for all films you watch.
* Listening to web radio when you're walking/commuting (if you have a smartphone/dataplan). Depending on the language, there are even programs in which the reporters speak slowly and provide a transcript (example: RFI français facile for French, Klartext for Swedish).
* Buying bilingual books (where the English is on the left and the other language is on the right).
Can't stress enough number 2. Developing oral skills is extremely important, also it takes a lot of time and you will never accomplish it if you only focus on the written form.
Language acquisition is scrappy. Immersion, cinema, osmosis, books, tapes, Wikipedia, supermarkets, recipes on soup cans, ATM interfaces, ingredient lists, the street - whatever works.
This extension probably works best for those with some degree of acquaintance with the target language, if only for the errors you spot.
I agree - I think it's better for more advanced students who can recognize a bad translation. Also, I got much better results when I increased the minimum word size, so only more obscure words get translated (a lousy measure of popularity I know, but it helped)
I think it's much, much more effective to just read a newspaper in the language you want to learn and use a dictionary. It's not as easy, but you're not going to expose yourself to bad grammar that you'll automatically pick up and have to unlearn later.