Learning German Using Google Spreadsheets

While learning a new language we always have two options

1. Improve your vocabulary. (easy but boring and laborious)
2. Read/Hear and Understand(difficult but helps you with grammar and sentence formation).

Deciding which one to begin with, without getting bored or overwhelmed is the real challenge. What if you could do them in tandem.

I tried building a simple solution for this and here is the first crude draft.

Read Up - Learn New Languages

The plugin translates your news articles : paragraph, sentence and word wise to get context and improve your vocabulary in one go. So all you need to do is pickup an article from any news site that published news in the language you would like to learn and paste it into the spreadsheet and you are good to go. It will translate the first paragraph from German(for example) to English. Once you read the translation in english you get an overall sense of the article. Now the plugin splits the paragraph into sentences and translates each one of them into english. Once you read the first sentence in english you get the macro context or the meaning of the sentence. Once you know this, the plugin further breaks down the sentence into words so that you can improve your vocabulary. Once this is done for couple of paragraphs you would have read a new article in english and german. You would have got the context of the each paragraph. Since you are reading and understanding the sentences you will also lean to speak easily. Since you are going through word by word translations as well you are improving your vocabulary. And the best part is you can read one article per day and you don't need to stress yourself. How cool is that.

Following are the Steps to use this plugin.

1. Download the Google Spreadsheet Addon
2. Goto https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/ and create a new spreadsheet. Let us call it "Learning German"
3. Since you are learning German, enter "en" in cell A1 and "de" in cell B1
4. Copy an article from any language past it in the cell A2.
5. Goto AddOns => Read Up and then click on "Translate Now"
6. Wait for 20 to 30 seconds for the script to run and then you will see the magic happen.

If you feel this is a little overwhelming before understanding how it can make it fun take a look at this sample spreadsheet to understand what it does.

Use the plugin and let me know if it was useful to you. If you would like to see any features as a part of the plugin let me know in comments. If there is any interest in the plugin I will consider spending more time on this plugin.