Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

You could always run it in a sandboxed browser (e.g. a Firefox profile) and limit the use to just language learning (e.g. reading neutral articles online). The data you would leak wouldn't be much different than what you risk any time you browse any website.

I can totally understand your concerns.

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 have a deep understanding of this point, a lack of vocabulary makes reading Japanese materials very difficult.

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 can second this, after finishing my intro Japanese classes I was able to parse the grammar of most sentences. Memorizing vocab was the hard part, so I used OCR on manga pages and then Yomitan to hover over and see word definitions (in English).

Isn't that what the Rikai line (10ten, Yomitan) of add-ons are for?

Thanks for your feedback!

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.

I was hoping to take a look at Linguaswap, but it isn't on your GitHub. Is it available anywhere?

Thanks for you feedback, agreed.

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.

After a certain age many people, and I'm definitely one of them, stop using phones for anything serious. Too small screen, unreable fonts, or alternatively zoomed-out fonts make pages unreadable anyway. So I'm basically back to using phones for, well, calls.. and a tablet or, if more than just casual, a real PC with a huge monitor if I want to actually spend some time on the net.

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.

You're absolutely right, we typically spend more time our our phones for most people. we're also preparing to port this feature to mobile, possibly based on the mobile version of Firefox browser.

It's a very good investment to spent a week or a month (typically depending on age) to really learn hiragana. Learn hiragana and katakana in parallel. Use an app like 'Kana mind', for example, to enforce memorization.

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.

I don't know a tool like this.

But this feature seems to be a fairly common requirement; we can consider add a switcher to implementing it.

Same, I love the idea - but I cannot read the hiragana/katakana (heck even: はい hai yes <- would work well).

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.

Really appreciate your feedback! we may have overlooked this when handling multilingual support, and we will optimize it in the next version.

we've considered using local llm, but the problem is that for a better user experience, we will add user's new vocabulary list, then inject words based on the list, it's hard to do this on local.

We will seriourly consider the point of support local llm, this will also allow more users to utilize our basic functions.

I hear this often but haven’t seen too many translation-free alternatives for the non-immersion tasks (eg: memorizing vocabulary for a standardized exam, daily study in a non-immersive environment). Have you seen any good monolingual techniques beyond “just get tons of exposure”?

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...

Second that. An Ollama version would be great :)

I'm using the Chrome extension in Vivaldi, and I hear no sound. Yomitan and the older Yomichan work fine.

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.. :-(

Thanks for feedback, in some cases, we use a NLP lib to detect to language of the word since we support multiple languages, this may be due to language detection failed on some words.

Thanks, We now support cross-language learning between for languages (English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese), hope could help you.

Thanks for your asking.

Yes, we will prioritize support for Safari, Opera, and Arc. Support for other browsers will be added as needed.

Thanks for your feedback, appreciate it.

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.

Thanks for the feedback, actually we use furigana to show the pronunciation, we use LLM to produce the word explanation, this may be due to LLM instability, could you help tell me the word of this case on your side.