cAsTa Ways: An interview with Artur Janc of Lingro
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on November 28, 2008
In today’s episode Kevin and I spoke with Artur Janc, a co-founder, along with Paul Kastner, of Lingro, an online environment that allows language learners to master vocabulary in context using a variety of innovative and learner-centric resources.
The idea for Lingro germinated one summer when Artur picked up the Spanish version of Harry Potter to practice his Spanish. Frustrated that each time he turned to look up a word in the dictionary it created a noticeable interruption in the flow of his reading, Artur developed a program that allows anyone to create personalized, contextualized vocabulary lists. His program won first prize in an annual competition at his alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He then collaborated with his colleague and friend, Paul Kastner, also a WPI graduate, to create an online, open source version, which they launched in November of 2007.
There are three main components to Lingro:
- Translate, which offers
- an online dictionary in seven languages with more to come
- a web viewer that transposes any web page into a dynamic, clickable dictionary. What’s more, you can do L1 to L2 as well as L2 to L2 searches. So if I go to a German website, as one of my options I can select German to German and have any word defined in German—a great resource for those advanced language learners. Check out our web site using this tool.
- a file viewer that allows you to upload .txt, .doc or .pdf files to make those documents searchable as well
- Learn, where you can
- create word lists
- access your word search history as ‘sentence history’, keeping those vocabulary searches contextualized
- games, where you can have fun practicing your vocabulary lists
- Collaborate, which gives you the opportunity to
- participate in expanding the dictionary databases
- add lingro widgets to your own site
- create language learning lessons based on your web site
Artur and Paul plan on launching a beta classroom version in January that will allow teachers to track what kinds of vocabulary students are learning and how well they are learning it. If you’re interested in participating in this pilot and providing valuable feedback, please get in touch with them.
We’ll follow up in a few days with a screencast of some of these features of Lingro. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this interview with Artur Janc of Lingro. If you have a story to share about using Lingro, please let us know!
The wATw Podcast: An Interview with Artur Janc of Lingro [73:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (500)Music for our podcasts is courtesy of George Wood and is called Travelogue. You can find more of George Wood’s music at podsafeaudio.com
About the author
Barbara Lindsey
Barbara Lindsey currently serves as director of the Multimedia Language Center at the University of Connecticut. She has given numerous presentations and workshops on Internet-based language instruction at the state and national level. Barbara has twelve years experience teaching German language at the university level, and for the private business sector as well as after school enrichment programs. She has served as project director on three federally funded grants and is a past president of the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers (2004-2006).Comments
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[...] recently posted our interview with Artur Janc, one of the co-founders of Lingro, an online dictionary built by and for language learners. We [...]
[...] covered Lingro extensively on our blog. Barbara created a series of screencasts on Lingro and we interviewed Aurtur Janc one of the creators of the site. Lingro creates an overlaid dictionary to just about any electronic [...]