7 ms·

Polyglot extension for Chrome - Learn a new language

78 points by Lorin 16y ago

Lorin 16y ago
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.
Griever 16y ago
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 :)
- _grrr 16y ago
  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.
junkbit 16y ago
Pretentious, watashi?
- junkbit 16y ago
  厳しい群衆
jgv 16y ago
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.
- Lorin 16y ago
  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 :)
  - jgv 16y ago
    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.
JoelMcCracken 16y ago
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.
revorad 16y ago
"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?
- mccutchen 16y ago
  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/jjjmnickdhkfpaocnkcfabdlfojmpakn https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jjjmnickdhkfpaoc... and http://github.com/mccutchen/ImageKill http://github.com/mccutchen/ImageKill
sounddust 16y ago
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.
- felideon 16y ago
  OT: Do you know of any good French publications/blogs for hackers or entrepreneurs?
  - sounddust 16y ago
    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.
  - sushi 16y ago
    Are you the kind of hacker who is interested in beer? http://www.bieremag.ca/ http://www.bieremag.ca/
  - Elite 16y ago
    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.
  - levesque 16y ago
gojomo 16y ago
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.
- slug 16y ago
  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.
- alinajaf 16y ago
  It's specific to Japanese, but rikai(chan|kun) has been an _extremely_ useful tool.
  - sirn 16y ago
    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/ http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/ [2]: http://jisho.org/words?jap=ねこ&eng=&dict=edict http://jisho.org/words?jap=ねこ&eng=&dict=edict [3]: http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=3&dname=2na&stype=0 http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=...
- DanielStraight 16y ago
nicolas314 16y ago
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.
jdeseno 16y ago
I liked this extension but don't use chrome, so I made: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/86091/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/86091/. If you find a bug, repo is here: http://github.com/jdeseno/PolyGlop http://github.com/jdeseno/PolyGlop, patches welcome!
mr_twj 16y ago
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.

78 points by Lorin 16y ago

Lorin 16y ago

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.

Griever 16y ago

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 :)

_grrr 16y ago
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.

junkbit 16y ago

Pretentious, watashi?

junkbit 16y ago
厳しい群衆

jgv 16y ago

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.

Lorin 16y ago
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 :)
- jgv 16y ago
  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.

JoelMcCracken 16y ago

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.

revorad 16y ago

"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?

mccutchen 16y ago
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/jjjmnickdhkfpaocnkcfabdlfojmpakn https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jjjmnickdhkfpaoc... and http://github.com/mccutchen/ImageKill http://github.com/mccutchen/ImageKill

sounddust 16y ago

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.

felideon 16y ago
OT: Do you know of any good French publications/blogs for hackers or entrepreneurs?
- sounddust 16y ago
  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.
- sushi 16y ago
  Are you the kind of hacker who is interested in beer? http://www.bieremag.ca/ http://www.bieremag.ca/
- Elite 16y ago
  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.
- levesque 16y ago

gojomo 16y ago

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.

slug 16y ago
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.
alinajaf 16y ago
It's specific to Japanese, but rikai(chan|kun) has been an _extremely_ useful tool.
- sirn 16y ago
  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/ http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/ [2]: http://jisho.org/words?jap=ねこ&eng=&dict=edict http://jisho.org/words?jap=ねこ&eng=&dict=edict [3]: http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=3&dname=2na&stype=0 http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=...
DanielStraight 16y ago

nicolas314 16y ago

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.

jdeseno 16y ago

I liked this extension but don't use chrome, so I made: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/86091/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/86091/. If you find a bug, repo is here: http://github.com/jdeseno/PolyGlop http://github.com/jdeseno/PolyGlop, patches welcome!

mr_twj 16y ago

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.