Very useful Firefox add-ons for language learning
these are some extremely useful add-ons for practising your language learning online. they are all for firefox, but some similar ones exist for google chrome, so you can either attempt to find them or use firefox as your "foreign-language-browsing" internet browser. if you use any that you think are really useful, please comment so i can check them out!
(note: "why not use add-ons involving google translate?" because google translate is not at all intended for serious language learning, it has many wrong/missing definitions for example so you should only use it when you really can't understand what is going on)
"vocabulary highlighter": install it on firefox here:
you can highlight a word/phrase and put in some kind of note. that way in the future whenever you see that word online, on any webpage (including email), the word will be highlighted and your note will exist when you hover over the highlighted item. you can remove or edit notes later, so that if you memorize a word and don’t need the hints anymore, you can get rid of it. (to add a word or phrase, highlight it then right-click. to edit or remove, right-click on a yellow word without you highlighting it yourself). you can also export a big list of your notes to use them with something else, or import a list to the add-on in case you already have a list of words you don't know. and if for some reason you want a note to pop up for a word but don't want it highlighted, you can edit the entry and mark a little checkbox that says "do not highlight".
sometimes, after you remove a word from the note list, it acts like it is still in there but says something like "undefined" as the note. this will fix itself if you restart firefox.
some people have trouble where it crashes firefox, in that case, just deactivate the tool when you are not reading anything in the language you're learning, and activate it when you plan to read some. you should also install this add-on (lazarus form recovery"), it saves multiple drafts of what you are typing online in case firefox crashes or the message doesn't send for some reason, etc. then when you go back to text box again, you can right-click and open the old drafts and your work is saved.
you can add multiple highlighter colours, to ex. have one colour be for vocab and one colour be for phrases.
to do this, right-click on a word (without it being highlighted) and go to “vocabulary highlighter”. a menu will pop up. (you can also click the red highlighter button here, to turn on/off highlighting overall) if you make any changes in this menu, it appears after you close the menu, not instantly. for me the menu has no close option so i have to restart firefox every time.
click on “pens, customize pens”. from there you can click the plus button to add a new pen, and you can change the colour of the pen. (i have one colour for vocab and one for phrases.) on the options there, “only highlight matches having left/right boundaries” means if there is a letter to the left or right of the term in the highlight notes (like “cat” and then “caterpillar” or “tomcat”), if it still highlights the word or not. for most of the nordic languages, it is not practical to have either of those checked because roots are put together to make a lot of words instead of each word being more unique.
if you have a word like “caterpillar” and have “pillar” already in the vocab but want to have “caterpillar” also a vocab word, after you add it, if you hover over the “cater” part it will show the definition for “caterpillar”, but if you hover over the “pillar” it shows the definition for “pillar”.
it makes it especially difficult if you have a lot of small pairs (like for swedish, ju, om, ja, i, på, etc.) as notes because those show up within other words a lot and may make it more difficult to hover and get the definition of the one you want. they also will show up a lot in english texts and distract you. so I would try to learn those small ones as fast as possible so you can remove them and they interfere less. If you are learning a language that has a lot of grammar, it could be just as useful as vocabulary to have grammar points (case endings etc.) highlighted in another colour.
if a highlighted word is in your tags on tumblr when you go to submit a post, it messes up your tags. all un-highlighted tags are fine, but the tag that has highlighting in it won’t be able to be submitted properly and it will add on extra nonsense tags that you’ll have to delete. so for example, if i have "and - wild duck (swedish)" as a highlighted word, and then try to write "food and drink" as a tag in tumblr, that tag won't work:
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why is it good to use?
it’s a good way to track your progress, because you can add a note every time you see a new word, and take screenshots once a month or so of random pages with lots of text, to show how many words are there that you don’t know, and watch them decrease over time!! also, normally before you fully memorise a word, you need to look it up several times anyway (and with languages such as icelandic or faroese, it may have taken some googling and research to figure out what exactly the word means because it's not in any free online dictionaries). this way you can look it up the first time you see it, then add a note with the meaning, gender, plural form, and any other useful information (such as in Icelandic, the case a verb governs) and then every single time you see the word online, you will be able to just hover over it and see the note and never need to look it up again. and like stated earlier, you can import/export your saved notes in a big list, so if someone you know has been using it and already has a lot of notes saved, they can export the list for you, and you will already have a lot of words that you don't need to put in yourself.
spelling dictionaries:
these simply make it so that you can switch between english or other-language spell-checking when you write something online. they are not available all the nordic languages unfortunately. there are some here although i'm not sure if they are the same ones i'm thinking of. there is also an unofficial icelandic one available and you may be able to find ones for the other minor languages. here is one where you can choose between sweden-swedish or finland-swedish. and here is a finnish one. after you install them, you should be able to right-click when you are in a text box (such as when writing a livejournal comment), see a menu called "language", and you can select between the different installed spell-check dictionaries (depending on the add-on it may be able to automatically detect which language you are writing in). i haven't ever seen any that checked grammar for languages besides english, only spelling.
dictionary search tools:
looks up selected words online in a dictionary (or other site, such as wiktionary and wikipedia) by simply right-clicking and clicking "look up in (whatever)". it copies the highlighted word and searches for it, so you don't have to bother with going to the home-page and typing it in yourself. you can add as many dictionaries as you want, declension dictionaries, etc. there are multiple tools that do the same thing and i don't know which one is the best, but i use this one. you simply go into the add-ons menu after you install it, and add in the urls of various dictionaries you want to use, replacing the search term with * or $ or whatever the add-on tells you to replace it with. so for example, if you search tyda.se for "sdfsdf" the url is:
http://tyda.se/search?form=1&w=sdfsdf&w_lang=&form=1&action=submit&form_search=1&source_langs=sv%2Cen
actually you can cut out all the stuff after the search term and it still works (and looks cleaner):
http://tyda.se/search?form=1&w=sdfsdf
then my add-on tells me to replace the search term with $, so when i put it in its settings, i would do do this:
now any word i highlight and click "look up in..." and click to look it up in tyda.se, it will search for it for me and open it in another tab (or window, if you have your firefox set so new links open in new windows).
proxy switchers:
basically, the internet knows where your computer is located, so if you try to watch ex. faroese tv, if you live outside of the faroes you can't watch it online. a proxy switcher will let you trick the internet into thinking you ARE located in the faroes. this is not a problem for most sites, but certain things that are really useful for learning/practising can sometimes be blocked to non-residents in this manner. there are a lot of these around, i use elite proxy switcher. what you do is, you go online and search for a list of proxies (the add-on doesn't have any built-in) for the country you want to pretend to be in. sometimes proxies disappear over time, meaning you can only use the same one for a few days/certain amount of time before it dies and isn't usable anymore. and you will probably have to look at a few different proxy list sites before you find one for the country you want, because people don't usually try to pretend they live in the nordics... (since a lot of stuff on major video/music sites are blocked to non-US residents, it's much more easier to find US proxy lists for example). this is another thing you can just set to inactive/turn off when you don't need to use it.