Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/MemWord

Motivation
Learning a new language is hard. It takes an enormous amount of effort to get to a base level and an equal or greater amount of effort to master. Unlike the the skill of riding a bike, fluidity with a foreign language can grow rusty and unusable after years of neglect. We must fit language practice into our daily routines.

This is not as easy as it sounds. We live in a busy world with hectic schedules. More and more we find ourselves

The web has the biggest collection of text on any conceivable subject, in every language and it is all free, yet this massive collection of text is hardly ever used to teach new languages. Foreign language courses frequently continue to use arbitrarily chosen collections of essays to teach reading skills. This leaves students interested in sports reading foreign essays on art, those interested in art reading foreign essays on politics and those interested in politics reading foreign essays on sports.

In addition, those that have the freedom to read the subjects they enjoy in books, magazines or the internet have the repetitive task of looking up words in the dictionary over and over again. Any language student knows this is as entertaining as pulling out toenails one at a time.

Concept
MemWord assists users to learn foreign languages using the vast variety of freely available material on the web. It accomplishes this goal by acting as both an electronic dictionary and a flashcard quizzing tool.

The tool would have four main functions
1.) Translate unknown words the user highlights and right clicks on
2.) If desired, adds words to flashcard database with foreign word or phrase, native definition and sample sentence referenced from the original website
3.) Quiz users on flashcard sets and keep accuracy statistics
4.) As an option, would highlight words on the page the user is trying to learn

This is not meant to be a full scale language learning platform. It is simply meant to be an intelligent tool to assist intermediate/advanced students of languages by providing contextual vocabulary related to their particular area of interest.

Mock-up
http://www.flickr.com/photos/planeterik/sets/72157622913484760/