The browser extension

Installing it

Installing the extension opens a welcome tab that asks whether you want to sign in and which languages you are learning. If you pick more than one, it also asks which one you study most: the website and the app start with that language’s courses and reviews. The last step links to a Wikipedia article in your main study language to try it on.

The popup and reading text on screen work without an account. Signing in adds your lookup history, words marked by your level, the level buttons in the popup, and subtitles on YouTube and Crunchyroll.

The sidebar

Click the Lingaku icon in the toolbar, or press Alt+Shift+LAltShiftL, to open or close the sidebar. It opens in the tab you are on and stays with that tab: switching tabs hides it, and coming back shows it again. For the page in that tab, it shows how difficult the page is for you, a Mark as read button, and the words you looked up there.

From the sidebar you can study the page’s words straight away, import them into a deck, or open them on the lookups page.

Which language a page is read in

The extension reads each page in the language it is written in, out of the languages you are learning. It decides from the page’s text, so an English article with examples in the language you study is read in that language. A page in none of your languages is left alone.

Text in another language on the same page is skipped, such as an English menu or a quote in a language you do not study. Those words stay plain text without the popup.

On YouTube and Crunchyroll the subtitles decide instead: a video is read in the language of its subtitles.

The language button at the top of the sidebar shows what the page is read in. Pick a language there to always read the site in it, or Automatic to let the extension decide again. Your languages… opens the list of languages you are learning, where you can add one, remove one or change your main study language.

Turning it off for a site

The switch at the top of the sidebar turns the popup off or on for the site you are on. Settings → Disabled sites lists the sites you turned off.