Show HN: Learn Japanese contextually while browsing (lingoku.ai)

It's a cool idea, but the lack of a space between regular words and words wrapped in a <span> is driving my typo-radar nuts

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Do you have a roadmap for adding support for more browsers eventually?

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 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).

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

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.

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: > 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?

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.

Nice project!

As a struggling lifelong English learner I had an exactly same idea, but for English.

> Just hover to get translation

Translating everything into your native language is pretty universally considered a very bad habit in language pedagogy.

This seems interesting. I would like an Ollama version and an ability to turn off the hovering as I already have Yomichan installed.

Is there a similar tool/extension that can show the Japanese word in romaji rather than hiragana or katakana?

it would be nice to see the japanese definition of the word in addition to the english definition in the hover modal

I tried the pronunciation feature, which works less than awesome on my system. I am happy to share that "語彙" is pronounced "chinese letter chinese letter", while for "効果的" it is "chinese letter chinese letter chinese letter".

Is that just my Debian/Firefox system? Or is "AI slop" the reason here?

Interesting. I'd love to get something like this into things I use frequently. Primary issue for me is, though I often browse HN for example, I only do so using an app. Generally I rarely use the browser for anything beyond research and linked articles.

This seems relevant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcolM6W5Odc

TL;DW you have to use the words

This looks really cool but I can't justify using it because of privacy concerns. Running this with a local ai and a strongly worded guarantee of no tracking/reselling of my metadata is something I would pay for.

some open-source options:

https://github.com/rowan-walshe/vocabify

https://github.com/GoodPraxis/oumu

This is amazing. I was planning to build exactly this for movie subtitles yesterday!

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.

This is a GAME CHANGER. Is it possible to buy pro version? how can we support you?

Thank you as well for having Chinese and Korean also included!

Nice concept but the design could use some love as it looks a bit on the vibe coding slop side of things.

I recommend reflection and meditation after long reading or study session to avoid burnout. Also prioritizing flashcards from books you've read can make them more meaningful.