Now trying out readlang.com

Here's a site readers may wish to try out - it's kind of similar to Anki but is online and thus far only offers ten languages. It was actually nine a few days ago until I asked the creator to add Portuguese, which he did fairly quickly. Until then every major Romance language plus Catalan was there, while Portuguese for some reason didn't make it in, which seemed odd. The site is still beta but has a nice clean design and feels very smooth.

The basic gist of the site is this: sign up and use it in one of two ways:

1) Directly paste text in, then read the text you have added. Clicking on words you don't know will cause it to use Google Translate to provide the meaning, and the word will be automatically added to the list of words to learn. Later on you test these using spaced repetition, and cards can then be edited (since Google Translate won't always be right), and dictionary results on wordreference.com are also called up.

2) Same as above, except that you can add entire articles with a single click with a bookmark, so when you are not using Readlang and come across something interesting, click the bookmark and now that page will be added for you to read over later.

All in all it seems like a fairly effortless way to pick up some more vocabulary.

Here's the intro video on the site for more: