AltSci Cell

by Javantea
July 12, 2009

AltSci Language AI 0.5 is a free and open source website to learn to read languages quicker than other methods. It takes topics that the user finds interesting and presents conversations on Twitter that include them. Each conversation is translated into English*. This way you can learn the language of your choice while you learn more about how people use words in that language. The histogram on the left shows the frequency of words in the conversations.

* Only the most common language used is translated. Some searches might not get translated. If this happens, try again or use Google Translate.

Below each Twitter message that's been translated, a translation will appear with a diamond (♦) next to it. After you've read the results to your satisfaction, you can take a new word or phrase that you'd like to learn more about and search on that. The results will be appended onto the end of the original results, which gives you more information to browse through. Feel free to copy the data you see here into a text editor or word processor to improve your comprehension skill.

Improvements upon previous release include: translation, return key now submits the query, more browsers supported, and improved visual cues.

This webpage was written in Javascript using the Twitter Search API and the Google AJAX Language API. You can recreate part of the functionality by going to Twitter Search and then posting the results in Google Translate. But neither of those services use a histogram, which is why this service is here. The more often a word comes up that you care about, the more you should try to learn it. Twitter gives us an incredibly high quality source of recent important, ever-changing conversational foreign language.

I am the author of this software and I plan to support it completely. Please E-mail me or message me on Twitter for any bug report or improvement that you'd like to suggest.