Polyglot extension for Chrome - Learn a new language | Hacker News Reader

Polyglot extension for Chrome - Learn a new language

chrome.google.com

78 pointsLorin35 comments

I just tried it with French (a language I already know).. and I don't think that it's a good tool. In my opinion, you should always avoid seeing incorrect usage of language when learning. This extension does not properly translate the words in context, it does not provide the proper forms of words that correspond with the subjects/objects (such as masculine/feminine/plural), and sometimes it's completely wrong. If you learned using this tool, you'd have to unlearn almost as much material as you learned.

I think it's much, much more effective to just read a newspaper in the language you want to learn and use a dictionary. It's not as easy, but you're not going to expose yourself to bad grammar that you'll automatically pick up and have to unlearn later.

OT: Do you know of any good French publications/blogs for hackers or entrepreneurs?

Sorry, I don't; I'd appreciate any recommendations as well!

I used to read business and tech news in French, but it was frustrating because most of the articles were rehashed from things I read hours (or days) before in English, and I try to keep the S/N ratio of my feed reader as high as possible. The feeds I read in French are mostly related to local news, European politics, music, art, cinema, local events, etc.

Are you the kind of hacker who is interested in beer? http://www.bieremag.ca/

There was an article that was linked to here where a French tech guy (speaking in English though) gave a pretty good video blog analysis of how much the average mobile app developer makes (not much).

Can't remember his name or site though.

French is my first language and I don't even know of any interesting sources. It saddens me, because I love reading stuff in French.

I guess you can always read about Ocaml in French.

The problem with reading a newspaper is that you need to do something else to do that. This allows you to see words translated while goofing off on the Internet.

And obviously it's not a perfect tool, but it's great to learn assorted new nouns and things like that. I've learned a few things in German since I turned it on.

Good point, but I'd recommend watching out for mistranslations, otherwise when speaking/writing German, the wrong word is going to come up, and you're going to have to be corrected several times before you are able to naturally find the correct word. In my experience, it's much harder to unlearn a mistake than to learn correctly the first time.

For learning without having to do something else, I'd recommend:

* Turning on subtitles in the target language for all films you watch.

* Listening to web radio when you're walking/commuting (if you have a smartphone/dataplan). Depending on the language, there are even programs in which the reporters speak slowly and provide a transcript (example: RFI français facile for French, Klartext for Swedish).

* Buying bilingual books (where the English is on the left and the other language is on the right).

Can't stress enough number 2. Developing oral skills is extremely important, also it takes a lot of time and you will never accomplish it if you only focus on the written form.

What if the extension could do the opposite. Translate most of a french webpage into your native tongue but leaving a few French words.

That way you get the correct words for the language you are trying to learn but ignore errors in the language you already know.

Any volunteers to make this extension? :)

I like the idea. Harder to execute, uncertain results, but an interesting concept non the less :)

I agree - I think it's better for more advanced students who can recognize a bad translation. Also, I got much better results when I increased the minimum word size, so only more obscure words get translated (a lousy measure of popularity I know, but it helped)

Language acquisition is scrappy. Immersion, cinema, osmosis, books, tapes, Wikipedia, supermarkets, recipes on soup cans, ATM interfaces, ingredient lists, the street - whatever works.

This extension probably works best for those with some degree of acquaintance with the target language, if only for the errors you spot.

I've long wanted an extension that rather than translating a full page, translates just the word under the mouse -- ideally without causing any reflow -- so that I could try struggling through reading a foreign-language page, incrementally learning the words as I progress.

Anyone seen such a thing?

It seems it could also mix well with this 'Polyglot' approach, by throwing in some percentage of pre-translated words, or remembering words known/unknown and differentially displaying those.

I can recommend qstardict and its variants. I use it on my nokia n800 and computer desktops (kde/gnome) and it's very useful. There's also ports for other platforms. I can select a word (and optionally press a key combination) and it automatically searches the word in dictionaries. There's also plenty of dictd clients that do the same. The advantage is that it works everywhere, not only within the browser.

There's also some firefox extensions and konqueror (KDE) can also easily do this by enabling the dictionary search engines, when pressing the right mouse button over a selected word.

It's specific to Japanese, but rikai(chan|kun) has been an _extremely_ useful tool.

Rikaichan[1] is indeed useful, but if someone want to learn Japanese using it, they have to be a little careful since Rikaichan use EDICT, it could led to pretty misleading translation[2] sometimes when taken out of context. (Compared to Progressive[3].)

(Mac OS X users already has Progressive dictionary built-in, just enable it in Dictionary.app and press Cmd+Ctrl+D over the word you want to lookup.)

[1]: http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

[2]: http://jisho.org/words?jap=ねこ&eng=&dict=edict

[3]: http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=...

Not an extension, but does what you describe.

http://lingro.com/

I'm using http://www.lingoes.net/ for this (unfortunately, Windows only).

The Google Toolbar for Firefox does this (and doesn't cause any reflow since it uses a tool-tip). My wife uses it to help her learn English. I don't use it, so I don't remember if the following is true, but I would guess that you can configure it to translate between any pair of languages supported by Google Translate.

Very, very bad idea. Speaking another language is unfortunately not about translating words but transforming language into another form while conveying the same ideas and respecting the author's initial wording as much as possible. Sometimes you cannot even translate without providing a piece of cultural explanation. Translating one word out of context is almost always bound to fail. This extension is useless at best, dangerous otherwise.

Found this while surfing for new extensions, it substitutes random words on a page with words in the language of your choice, which is a great way to increase your vocabulary in a somewhat passive manner.

This is a great idea. Seems like it could a pretty effective way to learn a new language. I've installed it and it provides a pretty good options panel where you can customize the frequency of translated works and the color of the text. It would be nice to have a tooltip for the translated words which displays them prior to translation. This would eliminate all guesswork and be slicker than turning the extension off and on again.

If you rollover the translated words it seems to give you the original meaning, although it would be better with the surrounding context I guess. I've already filled a bug report as it seems to be translating proper nouns and numbers as well :)

Ah yes I see it takes the original values and sets it as an alt attribute. The fact that I didn't realize it initially may speak to a UX issue. Might be worthwhile to have the original word show up a little bit sooner.

Really cool idea, but I must admit using this is going to take some time to get used to, especially if you are a user that prefers to skim read particular sites.

My only other complaint would be the ability to blacklist certain sites. EDIT: Didn't realize you can quickly just disable the plugin by clicking the extension icon. I suppose that is good enough for me then :)

Have started using it & it seems like a great way to brush up on a language. Agree that a list of blacklisted sites would be useful.

I liked this extension but don't use chrome, so I made: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/86091/.

If you find a bug, repo is here: http://github.com/jdeseno/PolyGlop, patches welcome!

I downloaded polyglot earlier today and found it mostly amusing in the context of Facebook (e.g. seeing my friends speaking in broken english.) Later, I came back and forgot about polyglot and started a little unit testing. Long story short, in spanish commas are really decimal points and vice versa.

I actually have been thinking about this, that possibly learning a new language iteratively may be the best way to internalize all of the new rules. I like this idea.

"This extension needs access to: Your data on all websites Your browsing history"

That's not very reassuring. Does anyone know what exactly it can access?

Chrome needs to work on its permissions messages or its permissions model. I developed a stupid simple extension[1] that just kills all the images on a given page, and the permissions required for it to do its work (mostly the `background.html` page communicating with a separate JS file) result in the exact same terrifying message when installing.

Specifically, I think it's the "tabs" permission in my case that causes that message, which I think I needed to ask for in order to have the permission show up as a page action, or something. The memory is hazy now.

(Note: There's a very good chance my extension could be rewritten to not need those permissions, but it was not immediately obvious how to do that when I wrote it, and I haven't poked at it since then.)

[1] https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jjjmnickdhkfpaoc... and http://github.com/mccutchen/ImageKill

Pretentious, watashi?

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