Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku.
The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience).
It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the translations fit the context (so it distinguishes between different meanings of the same word).
since it uses paid AI APIs for the words replacement, I couldn't make it 100% free (server costs are real, unfortunately). However, there is a "forever free" plan with daily credits that doesn't require a credit card. it should be enough for casual daily browsing.
I built this because I struggle with Anki burnout and wanted a way to review words without feeling like i am "studying"
It supports Chrome, Edge, and Firefox now. would love any feedback or feature requests!
I'm unsure however what you mean by
> No Ads · No Social · Zero Privacy Trace
and
> Web data is used only for real-time AI parsing, transmitted via SSL encryption, and the server never stores any original content.
Because the APIs for commercial LLMs, if you're not hosting the models yourself, definitely grab and store everything.
I’ve just updated the website to be more precise: we use enterprise-grade APIs where they said data is not used for training by default, and we don't log any original content on our own servers.
We also only send the specific text snippets needed for processing to minimize exposure. I really appreciate the feedback, it helps make the project better!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcolM6W5Odc
TL;DW you have to use the words
At the moment, Lingoku browser extension does send text to LLms for processing, we don't sell user data, but i agree that simply saying 'trust us' isn't sufficient.
Supporting local LLM is something we are actively considering, though there are still real constraints on the user experience.
I find that students of Japanese often have enough grammar to read widely after finishing a couple of beginner textbooks, but they are completely held back by vocabulary.
For this scenario, we will translate the Japanese text completely into English first, then inject japanese words in to the english text, the translated text with the injected Japanese words is displayed next to the original material.
This is the main feature I've been using myself, you can try it out and see if it's the feature you want.
I have a personal extension that I wrote (close to 12 years ago at this point) which does the same thing - translates random words on websites as you browse according to your linguistic level. It vastly predates LLMs though so it's all built on sentence segmentation, POS analysis for stemming, and other NLP techniques.
I've written a bunch of integrations for it so it works with websites, documents, even Kindle books.
https://mordenstar.com/projects/linguaswap
Now onto some feedback:
The site is visually a bit of a mess. The nav bar anchors but not to the top of the viewport (scroll and watch). Some of the cards are also different sizes. Some of the text isn't properly spaced (look for the colons).
LLM's makes this kind of words substitution more easier and accurate. we have also tried some methods like NLP, but effect is mediocre, but if we want use it in specific scenarios, NLP maybe more efficient.
The website's visual design definitely needs improvement. we are currently work on it.
BTW, i like the blog
The current version of word definition is somewhat rudimentary. right now we supported four languages(English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean), but we dont take much time to optimize for each language yet.
Our thought is that we will have a shared template across all the learning language, but also have abilities to customize the word definition template for language-specific needs.
Using romaji will, due to how the brain works, forever keep you out of learning kana properly, even when you see both at the same time. Learning kana is a small effort for a lot of gain.
Edit: Decided to make my own firefox addon to do it, no worry about daily limits and I can simply update a json file with more words when I feel like I'm remembering things.
But this feature seems to be a fairly common requirement; we can consider add a switcher to implementing it.
In short - I'm definitely now in the "browser for everything" group, I don't use apps if I can avoid it, and definitely not on phones.
is there a possibility of using local llm endpoints for this?
We will seriourly consider the point of support local llm, this will also allow more users to utilize our basic functions.
Translating everything into your native language is pretty universally considered a very bad habit in language pedagogy.
I’ve been experimenting with monolingual vocab this month but it is too soon to say if I like it or not: https://rickcarlino.com/notes/korean-language/monolingual-vo...
BTW, is there a way to remove the romaji? Having both hiragana and romaji together is not good.
Edit: And for some words there's _only_ romaji.. :-(
As a struggling lifelong English learner I had an exactly same idea, but for English.
Yes, we will prioritize support for Safari, Opera, and Arc. Support for other browsers will be added as needed.
Is that just my Debian/Firefox system? Or is "AI slop" the reason here?
I tried the above words in Chrome, and got the same problem. sorry about that, our tool is far from perfect. this is a bug in the extension, we will fix it asap.
