That makes a lot of sense, it really highlights the diffences in learning stages.
My current tool if primarily designed for intermediate language learners who have already learned some basic words, but still in the 'accumulation phase' - their main bottleneck is vocabulary size, so they need to see new words frequently.
it sounds like you are at a more advanced stage of learning Chinese, you have moved past simple vocab building and are focusing on flow and fluency reading. For your use case, that 'inverse' approach (Chinese with English safety nets) is definitely superior for pattern-matching, it's a different problem set, but a very valid one.
This is quite a great idea, as a native Chinese speaker, i want to say this is the way very similar how we learned Chinese when we were kids.
On the other hand, the Chinese writing system is logographic (or ideographic), unlike the English system which is phonetic. The most basic characters, such as 日 (sun), 月 (moon), and 山 (mountain), are essentially graphics (or pictures) of the objects themselves. that makes them very suitable for being represented by images. The emoji you are using is also very good.
I believe this method should be very effective for beginners in Chinese. However, once you have mastered the basic Chinese characters, you can learn about the structure of Chinese characters and then continue reading more materials to expand your vocabulary.
The real challenge is to expand your vocabulary through extensive reading, i'm actually working on a tool to solve this specific problem (https://lingoku.ai/learn-chinese), If you are reading English, it will insert Chinese text for you, if your are reading Chinese text, it will translate the text from Chinese to English then inject Chinese words into the translated text, thus improving your vocabulary while reading.
Fair point, the UI was partly AI-assisted, and the design is not our strongest area at the moment but something we are actively improving.
Appreciate the feedback.
Thanks for pointing this out. You're absolutely right that 'Zero Privacy Trace' was a bit too absolute.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.