What is the crowd's opinion of
Learning with Texts?
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3 reviews of this app found across the web:
Depends. If you constantly seek new and challenging material, it can absolutely happen. If you're finding yourself looking up the same things repeatedly, then targeted repetition may be a good idea.
At ~B1 I started listening to le journal en français facile everyday and putting the text it into learning with texts, marking known words as known and looking up vocab. The repetition and visual feedback of what you've encountered before really helps. (Treating every declension form as unique word can be annoying to some people, I myself found it nice to see 'I recognize that form, can mark down that as a known word!') Otherwise, pick one type of content and stick with it for some weeks to learn the vocab and typical expressions. Reading a series is easier than standalone novels, because you get used to the author's style and idiom.
The problem with missing words will stay a long time. I tried reading native material every 500 words I had learned and it stopped being really annoying at around 2500 words. Now I know 4000 words and there‘s still no news article or no page in a book where I know every word. But looking up one or two words is no problem while looking up half of all the words is frustrating as hell.
Some tools like "learning with texts" (free, but hard to setup, especially for Japanese) or LingQ (around $110/year) make reading much more easy and motivating. They mark words with color and you can see which you know, which you never encountered and which you encountered but don‘t know yet. If you touch/click one you see the translation (and hear speech synthesis audio in LingQ).
Learning with texts: https://sourceforge.net/projects/learning-with-texts/
LingQ: https://www.lingq.com
Per year, not per month. But still very expensive as it is basically just a reader that you usually just fill by yourself with content (there's community content but you usually want to import stuff you're interested in). They have training texts and grammar guides but in that regard there's much better content for free out there, I didn't use it for long.
But it works very well for me. I tried using Kindle's integrated dictionary and Yomichan with Anki support to read Japanese texts but that didn't really work. The game changer for me is that you can see your progress by the word coloring. That's immensely motivating for me because you don't really see your progress in Japanese for a long time.
If you're kind of tech savvy you can still try LWT, it uses the same concept:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/learning-with-texts/
You can run it from a locally installed webserver (you don't need to rent one) and there are step-by-step howtos that explain the installation.
I have it running as some kind of pet project to get rid of LingQ in the long run but you have to invest a lot of time to get it on a usable level. LingQ is much better for now. LWT doesn't have speech synthesis, for languages like Japanese and Chinese you have to preprocess your texts (adding spaces between words so LWT knows what a word is) and it doesn't have a browser addon to simply import text from websites.
If you just wanna try the concept you can create a free LingQ account. It is extremely limited by the count of words you can add per day (so limited that it is useless) but it is okay to check whether the method works for you.