Language Immersion for Chrome - learn a new language while you browse

Nice idea, but I don't like that's it's not written by a native speaker. You're bound to learn bad habits. Just spend less time on English sites and more time on sites in your target language wherever possible.<p>Two easy ways to immerse yourself with content created by native speakers in your target language:<p>1) Listen in your target language whenever possible (via audio books, movies, tv shows, and podcasts). I like podcasts best.<p>2) Read in your target language. Major news sites and blogs will most likely exist in your target language for free. And you maybe be able to buy books (fiction or non) written by native speakers as well.<p>You can <i>supplement</i> those two with working through exercises in a grammar book of your target language.<p>Obviously, if you have a native speaker to practice speaking with, do so, but the listening and reading suggestions alone will get you very far. I'm immersing in Spanish right now, and this is working well for me.

I love the idea - I've been looking for ways to try and "immerse" people in a new language without actually travelling for a while now.<p>I do have two worries about it, though. The first is that they seem to be using translations which aren't particularly accurate, which means its possible that if it works, you'll still end up sounding like a beginner.<p>The other worry is that the language you are learning is still embedded in your native language. I'm pretty sure this will not help with learning the grammar of words, and when you are constantly switching between your language and another language, it won't be very conducive to memorisation of the new language (from my own experience learning Japanese).<p>Its still a really neat idea though, and I wish the best to the creators.

I'm not sure si está working pero it's really entertaining to leer todo sus comments en espanglés.

This looks remarkably similar to Polyglot, which was released over a year ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669162" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669162</a><p>It's interesting how many of the comments here are similar to the ones there.

Regarding the comments, as a fluent but somewhat lapsed Norwegian speaker I don't think this is necessarily a great way to learn sentence structure or grammar, HOWEVER, it's an amazing way to buff up on vocab.<p>Maybe "brush up" would be more appropriate than "learn". The main advantages I see are that;<p>a) It's pretty passive<p>b) You're likely to learn vocabulary related to areas of interest, or at least areas you read about (work related perhaps).<p>It might benefit from some gameification or stats perhaps (e.g. number of pages, number of words, range of words)...

This is beyond awesome for a few reasons. Historically, learning a new language was hard because it generally wasn't interesting.<p>This extensions allows you to browse the internet and specifically your interests while immersing you to a language...uh whoa. Half the reason I didn't like my language courses was the content and classroom was hardly stimulating or relevant to my interests; this changes that entirely.<p>A great model if we could apply it to education more broadly.

The technique I like to do is read the foreign language Wikipedia. I try to pick articles that exist in both languages. It helps to know the subject a bit so you aren't constantly flipping back and forth.

<i>Sorry, your operating system is not supported just yet. The Chrome Web Store is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Why don't you send yourself a reminder to try it out later?</i><p>Silly me for using Chrome on ICS.

This is amazing. Perfect way to practice a language and pick one up. Only problem I can see with it is that it wont have pronunciation. This is a problem for character languages like Mandarin. I'll be using it regardless though.<p>edit: Never mind, you can hear pronunciation as described by the post replying to me.<p>I wonder how they will manage to increase the reliability of the translations. It would also be interesting to be able to practice multiple languages at the same time.

This is an interesting idea but awkward to use. I am semi-literate in Chinese so I selected intermediate Chinese immersion. I like that the words can be reverted to the original language, but having these Chinese words littered amongst a sea of English words is odd and difficult to process. If you go through an article and you're met with a Chinese word, your brain can't immediately process the new language. The constant switching between languages when it comes to reading is quite cumbersome, even if it is for the sake of learning. This is particularly so for languages of different forms like English and Chinese. Words/phrases that are slang cannot be directly translatable, which is detrimental to beginners who do not know that it has been incorrectly translated. I think it is mildly useful for intermediate leaners trying to increase their vocabulary set but not for language immersion or introduction to a new language.

I am a little annoyed, Esperanto is supported by the google translate API they cite (and say they support all languages on) yet it is not an option. I would love an immersion tool to help lean Esperanto (immersion is especially hard for Esperanto because of the small speaking population) I think I need to write my own version to spite them.

I used to speak French. Since I still know the grammatical rules of the language, but have largely lost any vocabulary I once had, this is perfect. I've been using it for the last hour or so and words long-since forgotten are slowly coming back to me. I'll leave it enabled and see how things go.

Awesome idea, but it doesn't have Japanese. Got me excited for nothing. :/

This is a great solution to unobtrusively learn vocabulary while reading the things we're interested in. As others pointed it's weakness is clearly in how it handles sentence structure, but it seems reasonable to accept that it's just going to do one thing really well.<p>There's only one problem I see with learning vocabulary this way, you need a way to store what you've learned. I thought of one solution, you could drag and drop words into a box linked to your Quizlet (or a similar service) account.<p>Great Extension. Thanks!

I've seen similar extensions for Firefox for years - one or two that replace words on webpages with Mandarin/Japanese translations (and I think even allows you to replace only the ones you have on a wordlist - meaning that you can choose to revise words via browsing). I've always meant to use those extensions but never got around to.<p>Guess I won't be using this one since I don't use Chrome (I still find it a surprise to discover that most web developers actually use Chrome and not Firefox).

I think it's better to read a broken translation than a broken original source. That is: go to a foreign language site of your choice, then translate it into broken english.

I moved to Spain a couple of months ago and currently work for my company in London from a shared office in Granada. I may well be the perfect user of this plugin. I've already studied Michelle Thomas' course so I understand grammar etc. My problem now is purely vocab. I spend my working day on the web, reading page after page of english. This plugin is perfect! It means I can now be learning vocab while I'm working.

I totally had this idea 1 month ago. I was trying to get myself excited enough to go through with the implementation. And here it is...! A bittersweet moment indeed. :)<p>I'm going to keep this on for a while. My inlaws are visiting from abroad, so I need all the help I can get.

Very nice idea, I'm trying it at the moment but it seems not to speak the translation. English &#62; Danish, anyone has the same problem and how to fix ?

I thought Google did away with the Translate API. Are you sneaking around this by loading it in a background page and simulating user interaction?

Seriously? Learning a language translated by Google Translate websites to watch? With ideas like this to run we are all dumber, not smarter.

This is very cool. Definitely giving it a shot.