Lingro.com - A Multilingual Dictionary

So you want to be a globetrotting polyglot who can order wine and cheese in five languages? If, like many people, you haven’t got the cash to go study abroad or to hire a private tutor, you may do well to check out Lingro, a very cool, multilingual Ajax dictionary. Besides the hipness factor, the folks over at Lingro staunchly believe that knowledge should be free and accessible to everyone, so you won’t go broke using Lingro. Currently only a handful of languages are supported: French, Polish, Spanish, German and Italian. More dictionaries are on the way however. There are several tools available. One is the website viewer; to use it, simply type in the URL of whatever website you’re reading and you’ll be able to click on any word to get a translation. Once you’ve translated a word, you can add it to your history for later viewing. From there, you can study your lists using Lingro’s handy flash card games. There’s also a bookmarklet so you can open any site using Lingro with one click. As soon as you’ve mastered a language, do contribute by adding/editing definitions to Lingro’s community dictionaries.

“lingro was conceived in August 2005, when Artur decided to practice his Spanish by reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofál. As a competent but non-expert speaker, he found that looking up new vocabulary took much more time than the reading itself. Frustrated with the how slow existing online dictionaries were, he wrote a program to help him translate and learn words in their original context.

lingro's mission is to create an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them.”

Lingro is one cool and practical tool. Instead of simply wasting time reading interesting yet, rather unnecessary things on the web, you could also be stretching your mind linguistically, by translating texts using Lingro. It’s free, and it’s easy to use. All in all a great tool for helping you learn a new language.

Will Lingro add pronunciations? A thesaurus? Will they build up more of a community, so that members can exchange tips/lessons?