About

Alpha Testing

This website is in alpha testing and is actively undevelopment. That means there is no guarentee that it will work. Thats actually the point of the testing: to find out if the site works and fix it if it doesn't, as well as to determine if this method of studying is of any value to others. As such please use the contact us page to tell us what isn't working and both the good and bad about way the site functions and method of study its self.

Alpha testing started in late July 2024, at this point there is not definative end point for alpha testing. It will depend on how the testing goes.

What is JTRL?

JTRL is a website with the goal of helping you practice a language you are learning. The key is practice rather than learn. There are many way to learn the language, but what I always found difficult was practicing what I had learned. There may be a short set of exercises with the study material, but never enough to fully internalize the concepts. My attempts a reading native material even childrens books got bogged down by the freqent need to looks up terms. So JTRL is an attempt to solve that problem. First you enter into JTRL the words and grammar that you have already studied. Then JTRL searches through its database to give you only texts for which you already know all the words and grammar. The goal is to practice what in know in real texts.

Getting started / How to use

After creating an account. The first step is to tell JTRL what words you know. There are two general ways to add words.

The first is to go to All Words or Unknown Words pages from the navigatio bar. On those two pages you can search for and select the root words that you know and save them to your known words.

The second way is to go to the Add Words page. Here you can upload either a Anki flashcard file, text file or CSV file that contain words or sentences that you know and understand, or you can paste them directly into the text box. From there JTRL will process the infomation and save the root words in those files to your known words.

Setting a word as Focus will try to force the word to come up at least every 30 days. Note: the length f the Focus can be changed on the Settings page.

Next head over to the grammar page. Here you can select what grammar you know. Selecting the known column will allow words with grammar in the texts JTRL displays. Selecting Even if Unknown will allow any word with that grammar point to be shown even if you haven't saved that word to your know words. This is a great way to expose your self to things like the names the people and places. Note: the Focus box for grammar is still under development and currenly has no effect.

Once you have entered your words and grammar head over to the learn page. JTRL will take a couple of minutes to process through your updates. Then it will display sentences that you should be able to mostly understand. You can check yourself by clicking the show translation button. If you don't completely understand or you forget a word, don't worry, thats the point, we're practicing. If you don't want JTRL to count that sentence as seen, click the Words Only button. You can also see how the text was broken down with the Show Grammar Breakdown button. Click the Skip box will not count that word as seen, so if it is a Focus word it's counter is not reset. If you realized you made a mistake, you can undo one sentence.

The best thing to do is play with it and see what works best for you.

Text to Speech

If you browser/computer has the language package for your target language installed, that audio of the current sentence will be available on the practice page. The quality of the text to speech will depend on the language pack you have install. If you do not have it installed you can check this website for installing language packs on windows: Install a language for Windows

For Android users, TTS will usually work after the second time loading. Android TTS language is based on that devices accessability settings.

Future development

Currently the focus is to get JTRL working and launched with a basic set of working features similar to what the current version is. However I have had many thoughts on how to improve JTRL by adding new features, in no particualr order with no guareente that they will all be implented here are a couple of the more attainable ideas.

Privacy and security / Terms of use

I'll be honest, I'm not a web developer by trade, I don't know what I am doing. I can't guarentee security. Don't put anything into this site you don't want hackers getting.

The only personal information I ask for is an email address to allow password recovery. I will not sell it or share it. I do keep rudimentary logs of what is done on the site to understand how its used and to find and fix issues.

I make no guarentee that any information displayed is correct.

Resources and Thanks

Sentences come from the Tatoeba project.

Natural Language Processing is done by Spacy

A thanks to all of the sites that give and share tutorials and information on coding. Without them this site would not exist.


More questions? Reachout on the Contact page

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