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Comment by chaosprint | Hacker News Reader

I found this very useful for learning second language: https://immersivetranslate.com/

Daily news is better resource than books IMHO.

I have no vested interest here. The thing is, since it's not open source, I'm a bit worried about data privacy, especially because the plugin can see everything I browse.

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It looks great, but I wish these would be more flexible. I'm going to have an extension, I'd prefer one that doesn't do only full translations.

I'd love a similar one to this that'd give you an "make this easier" button that'd start by providing a vocabulary for the paragraph, simplifying the language, or interjecting explanations in simple language, move to replacing words with English translations, and only as a last resort to a full translation.

With current LLMs it ought to be relatively easy to offer a UI with an "stepwise easier" option and just a handful of prompts to direct the "translation" result complexity accordingly...

I don't think news will give you a well rounded vocabulary. Im studying with an Anki deck which got its word order scraped from news.

I know three different words for price (price in general, specific item, and formal) but I have yet to see, say, oven.

Mmm. I think once you get out of the super common words that appear in any style of text, the ideal is to learn words from something guided by what appears specifically in what you want to read. For Japanese I'm currently using jpdb.io, which (if there is a deck for the book you're reading) lets you work on the words that match what you're reading. It has its flaws but overall it's been working out for me.

I think the idea is to use a book that you have already read in your language, maybe even multiple time (favourite book).

This way your mind already has all the associations stored in your brain for easy access, and you just need to link it to the foreign concepts. Supposed to be a great way to learn new languages after you know the basic grammar and such.

Parallel texts work quite well without having read it before too if you keep the original next to you. I lifted by German up a whole grade my last year, largely by reading Goethe's Faust in parallel with a translation.

Having an easy version is a big boon, though, and I think LLMs now provide an amazing opportunity to create custom proper parallel texts (showing both) where you could adjust the difficulty level of the translation to suit your current skill level.

Is it better than DeepL own extension?

Edit: it is.

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