Foreign Language Text Reader Alternatives

Foreign Language Text Reader

FLTR helps you to do both extensive and intensive reading as part of your foreign language acquisition in an easy and pleasant way.

While reading, you look up unknown words in web dictionaries (you must be online to do so) and save vocabulary terms (words and multi-word expressions) with translations, romanization (like Pinyin, Hiragana, etc., optional) and example sentence (optional). Each term has also a learning status (1/"Unknown" to 5/"Known", plus Statuses "Ignored" and "Well Known") with an associated color.

The saved words will automatically show up with all their data and status in all texts in the same language. They can be easily imported into flashcard software like Anki or Mnemosyne via the export function.

FLTR is in many areas similar to the Public Domain software "Learning With Texts" (LWT). But FLTR is much easier to install and to run - no personal web server and no database is needed. "LingQ.com" offers a (web) service with a huge text library and tutoring services, and is similar to FLTR, but much slower because it is a web service. You must be online to use LingQ, and it costs money (basic account: $10 per month).

FLTR is programmed in Java 6. To run FLTR, you need an installed Java 6 or Java 7 Runtime Engine (JRE) from http://java.com . The program runs on Mac OS X (only with Apple's Java 6), Windows XP, Windows 7/8, and Unix/Linux. There is no need to be online while using FLTR, however you must be online if you use online dictionaries.

FLTR reads and writes its data (language definitions, texts, terms, export, general settings) in UTF-8 text or TAB-delimited CSV files, which makes it easy to add, change, or extract data with simple to use programs like a text editor or a spreadsheet program.