
Polyglot extension for Chrome - Learn a new language - Lorin
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plpjkjplknknmhfhkjgcfgofclmlnine
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sounddust
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.

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

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levesque
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.

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eru
I guess you can always read about Ocaml in French.

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gojomo
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.

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

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sirn
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](http://jisho.org/words?jap=ねこ&eng=&dict=edict)

[3]:
[http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=...](http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=3&dname=2na&stype=0)

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nicolas314
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.

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Lorin
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.

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jgv
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.

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Lorin
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 :)

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jgv
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.

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Griever
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 :)

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_grrr
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.

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jdeseno
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!

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mr_twj
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.

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JoelMcCracken
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.

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revorad
"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?

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mccutchen
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...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jjjmnickdhkfpaocnkcfabdlfojmpakn)
and <http://github.com/mccutchen/ImageKill>

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junkbit
Pretentious, watashi?

~~~
junkbit
厳しい群衆

