oh, she is fallen into a pit of ink

When I'm on the Internet, there's two cases: either I'm reading stuff in English and therefore not learning anything Spanish or I'm reading in Spanish but don't know every word.

In the first case, I use the Language Immersion for Chrome add-on, which randomly switches words from English to Spanish in whatever article I'm reading. Sometimes the translation through Google Translate is amusingly off (if the English says "There was only one left", the translation might switch "left" to "izquierda", which is "the opposite of right" not "remaining" as in this context), and it's much more suited for learning individual words, not any sort of grammar. However, I like the quirkiness and I've used it for months to get exposure to Spanish even when I'm wasting time reading blog posts in English.

In the second case, I'm reading in Spanish, usually news articles (or celebrity gossip... no me juzguen). In that case, I use Lingro, which is a nifty site that provides clickable definitions for every word on a page. So if I'm reading CNN en Español, I might instead use the URL: "http://lingro.com/translate/http://cnnespanol.cnn.com/". Now I can click any unfamiliar word on the page, and the English definition pops up right there, without having to copy/paste to another dictionary. And as a bonus, if I'm logged into Lingo, it will save all the words I click and give me a list to review later.

One caveat: the Chrome extension doesn't work on Reddit. And Reddit is my English-reading, time-wasting nemesis. I admit it.

I use Notepad++ for coding (built-in FTP... so convenient). But I wasn't satisfied with the default themes, so I created another one based on the nightshimmer theme for Vim. Includes PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript styling only.



nightshimmer

Save this file as XML in the Notepad++ themes folder to install the theme.