Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

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!

https://lingoku.ai/learn-japanese

Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing
lingoku.ai

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).