Recently a user reached out and suggested adding some form of word tracking to Readerbear. Initially I was unsure about the usefulness of this, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised the value.

How does it work?

As shown above, words are underlined according to your familiarity of them. Unknown words are underlined with red, words you are learning are underlined with yellow and words you already know are underlined with green on hover.

The fundamental idea is that it allows you to quickly gauge your comprehension for some content, and focus your attention on words you don't know or are learning.

I have some potential usecases that I think would be useful:

Comprehension analysis per webpage you visit

This would allow content difficulty relative to someone's knowledge to be easily gauged. For example if the comprehension is < 80%, it could be deemed as too difficult for their current level.

Content recommendation system

As Readerbear can work with any website, such as YouTube and Netflix, we could collect information about different web pages into a library of content, and based on a user's known word count, recommend content that targets a sweet spot of language learning.

Recommend "low hanging fruit" words

For language learning, it's generally recommended to learn words with a higher frequency first before others, as that will give the most value to understanding more content. If we can have frequency data available for each word (e.g. a word is in the top 1000 words), then we can selectively recommend words to learn. For example if a user knows 2000 words, we could highlight unknown words that are part of the 4000 most common words.

Statistics

Motivation in language learning can be challenging sometimes, especially once reaching what is commonly called the "intermediate plateau". When first learning a language, growth will feel exponential as you're starting out with a small vocabulary. However once you reach higher levels, it's much harder to see visible progress. Having some form of word tracking would greatly help here, as you would be able to visibly see your known word count increase over time.

Conclusion

These are just some ideas I had that I thought would be a nice addition to language learning. I've implemented word tracking recently into Readerbear, as well as a simple comprehension analysis for webpages. Feel free to give it a try!