Copyright (c) 2008-2009 by Dmitri Titov
What is Firelang?
Firelang is a set of tools that help you learn languages while surfing the net.
More specifically, Firelang transforms the web pages you visit into learning material by hiding articles and
colorizing nouns according to their gender (colorization works currently for German language only).
Firelang keeps track of dictionary lookups and makes them as easy to launch as by double-clicking the word.
How do I use Firelang?
Those are 3 tools currently available in Firelang:
a) Dictionary Manager with Translation History feature
b) Articles Hiding Tool
c) Colorization Tool
Translating words with Firelang: Dictionary Manager
Firelang allows you to quickly and conveniently translate unknown words with online dictionary of your choice.
Select a word and use 'Firelang | Translate with ...' option in context menu.
A new webpage with translation will be opened in a new browser window or tab, depending on the settings:
Customization
User can configure which online dictionaries are available in context menu. Any number of dictionaries can be added:
Dictionary profile looks like this:
Default dictionary and translation by double-click
The latest-used dictionary is available in top-level context menu so it can be reused quickly.
Another way to constanlty reuse latest dictionary is to enable double-click mode, which is convenient for frequent lookups.
That can be done either in general settings dialog or in upper-left corner of translation window:
A panel at the top translation window allows for 1-click dictionary switch. This panel contains all dictionaries configured by user in Settings dialog.
Default dictionary is marked by bold blue color. User can set currenly selected dictionary as active by clicking appropriate link:
Firelang's Translation History
Translation history is kept by Firelang so user can review the words learnt before.
Saved words are presented as hyperlinks to the dictionary used to look them up, so user can re-translate them simply by one click.
Firelang saves the context of the word being lookup up, as well as URL of its source document, so user can review lookups done in the past:
There is a possibility to filter history entries by dictionary used for lookup.
Firelang's Reminder Feature
It makes sense to have a quick look on previously searched words every time you open Firelang translation window.
Use "Reminder" feature to enable previous words display:
Reminder allows flexible customisation as shown on screenshot above.
Firelang's Articles Hiding Tool
Articles Hiding Tool, as well as Colorization Tool and History Highlight Tool, can be either enabled or disabled.
User can enable/disable them using Tools | Firelang menu.
Once enabled, the tool remains active until it is explicitely switched off by user, even after browser restart.
When active, Articles Hiding tool transforms 'on-the-fly' current web page by replacing articles by interactive placeholders.
Those placeholders are automatically removed by mouse-over event, allowing user to try to guess the right answer and then immediately verify it.
See screenshot below.
Moving mouse to placeholder shows article.
See animation below.
Settings dialog allows flexible customization of word groups hidden by Firelang.
As shown above, user can define his own "language profiles", corresponding to diffirent languages or to different word groups withing one language.
Also user can enable empty placeholders which are added randomly to web page.
Firelang's Colorize Tool
Colorize tool, once enabled via Tools | Firelang submenu, marks all nouns (currrently only German) on web page according to their gender.
Memorizing gender of words is an important part of learning language (that has genders at all, unlike English).
Settings for Colorize tool allows flexible customization.
For example, one can enable partial colorization, when only those words whose gender cannot be determined by rules are colorized.
If a word consists of several roots, there is an option in Firelang Settings dialog to colorize them all recursively.
Firelang uses build-in German word list (about 50,000 entries) to determine gender.
Since that list does not (and cannot) cover all German nouns, the possibility to add custom gender information is available in Firelang Settings dialog.
Firelang's History Highlighting Tool
Firelang can hightlight all words that were previously translated by it and therefore kept in Translation History.
This highlighting works on every page you visit in Firefox browser.
The tool can be switched on/off via Tools | Firelang | Enable/Disable History Highlight menu item.
Firelang's Hot Keys
All three tools (Colorization, Articles Hiding and History Hightlight) can be switched on/off via Hot Keys.
Use forth tab in Firelang Settings to specify which keys enable those tools:
