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Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

lingoku.ai

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Re: Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

#11

Post by englishcat »

vunderba wrote: post #7

Nice job! There have been quite a few of these language substitution extensions over the years. (Language Immersion, Polyglot, MindTheWord, etc.) 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 an…

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.

Re: Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

#12

Post by englishcat »

jz391 wrote: post #9

Interesting. The voice used for the pronunciation sound seems to be using the wrong language though (FYI using Firefox).

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.

Re: Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

#13

Post by LandenLove »

The concept of "injecting" Japanese into text written in a different language is interesting. But I feel the presentation of word definitions are not great. Something similar to https://yomitan.wiki/ or https://jisho.org/search/kotoba would be preferred. E.g. 言葉ーことばーLanguage, word or phraseーKanji definitionsーSample sentence

Re: Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

#15

Post by laurieg »

Have you done any work on trying to make the opposite? Injecting English words into Japanese text to make it easier to read?

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.

Re: Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

#16

Post by quamserena »

laurieg wrote: post #15

Have you done any work on trying to make the opposite? Injecting English words into Japanese text to make it easier to read? 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.

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).

Re: Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

#18

Post by englishcat »

shiroiuma wrote: post #10

Why is it using romaji to show the pronunciation, instead of furigana? Any serious Japanese learner will learn hiragana and katakana very early on, and these are better for reading pronunciation than romaji.

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.

Re: Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing

#19

Post by englishcat »

jedbrooke wrote: post #14

re: > since it uses paid AI APIs for the words replacement, I couldn't make it 100% free (server costs are real, unfortunately) is there a possibility of using local llm endpoints for this?

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.

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