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Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache dwds.de
If you can handle – or actually prefer the increased stimulus of – a monolingual dictionary resource, this one looks nice – with its parallel display of dictionary entries, etymology, common collocates, and empirical use in KWIK format – and well-founded: Based on the Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (WDG) and providing access to many corpora that document empirical use (including frequency and longitudinal information) of the language – modern German, including spoken language and many newspapers, altogether comprising about 1.75 bn words.
Advanced language learners can test their English, German or Spanish proficiency in 3.5 minutes here using Exhale
Update: A new version of the Spanish vocabulary test is here, and the English vocabulary test has been updated here.
Go here and click English or German, or (also requiring only 3.5 minutes to take, but more for manually grading your test with this answer key) go here for Spanish, if you want to to take a simple quick vocabulary test that has been shown to correlate well with general proficiency. You can find more info here on English and German, and here on Spanish.
How to install and use a free dictionary/encyclopedia app in MS-Word 2013
Installing is easy (our example is Wikipedia): Right-click a word, pick “define” from the context menu, the click download in the side pane for the app you choose.
Usage is also easy: To look up phrases, select, right-click and choose define: 
To look up individual words, you can also just double-click the word: 
You can also click “Expand”: 
To install more dictionaries after the first one, click Insert / Apps for Office. 
You can search for your L2 (too many to list): 
It works for base forms: 
But I cannot lemmatize (ouch): 
I found out that when I go to Insert/ My Apps/ See all : 
, I can show more than one app in the side pane.
However,how o I change the default lookup that happens on double click on a word?
Learn and teach writing in your second language on Lang-8.com
Improving language learning with technology for me seems to have 2 avenues: AI and human intelligence. Automated feedback on writing provided by proofing tools – even if they have become smarter and more contextual to spot (in MS-Word 2007 and up) common errors like your/you’re or their/there – makes one wonder about the feasibility of the former. But that automated essay-scoring tools which have been developed and deployed (at least for ESL) claim to score similarly as teachers makes one wonder about much more… Correcting writing remains expensive!
So may be we should look into crowd-sourced writing correction which needs no cutting edge NLP, only well-understood WWW-infrastructural technology to connect interested parties, but requires social engineering to attract and keep good contributors (and a viable business model to stay afloat: This site seems freemium).
Reading online comments and postings in your native language makes one wonder: can language teachers be replaced by crowdsourcing? I became aware of this the language learning website that offers peer correction of writing input by native-speaker through a language learner corpus. I have not thoroughly evaluated the site, but the fact that its data is being used by SLA researchers here (http://cl.naist.jp/nldata/lang-8/) seems a strong indicator that the work done on the website is of value.
To judge by the numbers accompanying the corpus (it is a snapshot from 2010, a newer version is available however on request), these are the most-represented L2 on lang-8.com: 
A first look at the Google Dictionary extension for Chrome
- We
- have not pre-installed in the LRC (for that the extension would need to be more manageable by the teacher during face-to-face classes, which include exams),
- but can (with some reservations) recommend the Google Dictionary extension (even though it is only available for Chrome). Here is why:
- Google dictionary extension provides an interface to Google define and translate
- that is convenient (as quickly accessed like glosses) for reading activities in many languages (Q: is the privileged word sense displayed here intelligently chosen?)
- while (for some languages more than for others) providing access to additional word senses, usage examples and historical background information
- Interface 1: Tooltip,
- for English with audio
- for other languages without audio (even though audio pronunciation may be available in Google translate for that language):
- convenient access (I have been loving the tooltip interface since Google toolbar days)
- limited, but useful information,
- a word sense – not that this is still not contextually intelligent (Cannot blame them here!) and hence more than one word sense should be offered (here I must blame them: Boo!!): E.g. here “arch” should at show more than the most common word sense:
- including pronunciation (not IPA, but audio)
- a word sense – not that this is still not contextually intelligent (Cannot blame them here!) and hence more than one word sense should be offered (here I must blame them: Boo!!): E.g. here “arch” should at show more than the most common word sense:
- Interface 2 (“more”)
- For English, a click on “more” leads to the Google “define”search operator (the related etymology search operator has been reviewed here before):
- Interface 3: unfold the search results by clicking on the down arrow at the bottom to access additional information:
=
- additional word sense entries
- historical:
- etymology
- frequency data
- translation/dictionary entry:
- for our learners of languages other than English, the translation appears right in the tool tip, see above;
- for our ESL learners, this seems a few too many steps for accessing this information, although a monolingual dictionary is useful in many instances also.
- For English, a click on “more” leads to the Google “define”search operator (the related etymology search operator has been reviewed here before):
- For languages other than English, a click on more leads to Google translate, which (should get its own article, but for what it is worth) can be
- more limiting than “define”: While you are given multiple word senses for
- Spanish:
- and to a lesser extent, for
- Arabic:
- Hindi:
- Arabic:
- Spanish:
- for many languages the results are much more limiting:
- Even if you look up German or French, you revert back to the (pedagogically terrible) single word-sense original “translation” interface )
- For East Asian languages, you get Roman alphabet transcriptions
- e.g. Chinese with Pinyin:
- e.g. Japanese:
- e.g. Chinese with Pinyin:
- Even if you look up German or French, you revert back to the (pedagogically terrible) single word-sense original “translation” interface )
- more limiting than “define”: While you are given multiple word senses for
- for English with audio
- Still no per-user tracking? Here it would make sense for the user.
Quizlet.com for Vocabulary learning practice
Neallt 2014 is featuring a presentation on “Using Quizlet.com to generate and share vocabulary activities” (William Price, University of Pittsburgh). I cannot attend, but the program inspired me to hold my own sneak preview:
Quizlet.com is yet another site that provides a variety of flashcard and quiz activities for a given wordlist. A nice example is the “Speller”activity – which proves a text-to-speech generated aural cue for dictation (not included in this video):
Or step-by-step:
Unfortunately, the AI seems limited to only 1-1 L1-L2 relationships (which precludes how vocabulary seems to be learnt best: in phrasal contexts):
Feedback on “wrong” user input is color red, aural and visual presentation of the correct form: 
Then the application re-prompts for user input and allows user correction:
This is a “Test activity. Foreign language character input seems easy (but does beg the question since the inputs appear only when they are needed…)
Mix-and-match is called Scatter:
Here is the activity overview: 
Wait, there is more: 
Quizlet supports many dozen languages, including non-western, including ancient, not differentiating between modern and ancient Greek, but the browsing capabilities – admittedly a hard task – are somewhat flat (search and language)):
And boasts 20 million sets (as of today – many consisting of 2 terms or few more). As so often, usefulness for class instruction hinges on the availability of textbook-aligned vocabulary lists. However, if you have them with your textbooks, Quizlet makes it automatic to generate uploaded materials into exercises.
However, as said, you may not like how much you have to dumb it down.
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Other ways to find help
If you cannot find it here, look there: 5,500 Language-Learning Links and Programs for learning or teaching 150 languages
Shortcuts:Our Lists, Our Maps, LRC Staff Moodle Site,LRC Project Moodle Site, 49erexpress, UNCC Moodle, Student Recordings: s:claslcslrcsanakostudent
Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
Test the Sanako Installer, Webbrowser Popup Konfigurator for XP, or Windows7, faster LRC TeacherPC Log-in Let MS facilitate diacritics writing by installing for you US-International keyboard layout
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