I think a Firefox addon would be an amazing way to promote the website. People could get the addon for free from the Mozilla website and save words from websites they see as well as see unknown words highlighted like on the LingQ system. Many language learning addons get thousands of downloads so I think this would work well. The addon Chinese Perapera-kun gets 2,000 downloads a week (on average) and all it does is translate words from Chinese to English; imagine what a LingQ addon could do!
I think this is a great idea. In a similar line of thought, an iPhone LingQ app could also work really great.
Thanks for the suggestions. We will look into both of these things. It’s just a question of when we can get to them.
Good idea, I’d love that. I use Firefox. 
I just want to revive this super-old thread. A FF add-on whereby you could LingQ words (and grab the surrounding phrase) would be a great addition to LingQ. Often I am reading very short comments in Japanese on FB or what not and I do not want to “break the flow” by importing a one sentence text into LingQ. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the import bookmarklet cannot be made to open in a new tab or window.
If this is technically difficult, a good compromise would be to have an addon that created a list in a .csv document that could periodically be imported into LingQ. Rikaichan does this but the formatting is wrong for LingQ.
i thought about writing a ff addon that would display your current lingqs in the text on a page as well as allow you to lingq words and phrases you encounter on any website, the problem however is that the lingq api does not yet provide a method for creating lingqs
Probably more important things for the moment, but there are some cool things which could be done, no doubt.
“more important things” Yeah, I should really file my tax return.
dooo, what format would the csv have to be in?
A firefox addon could currently be written to highlight current lingqs in yellow, and create a csv out of saved words and phrases from pages. I have no idea how much work it would be to do so however.
I guess column A: Target word or phrase B: Hint C: Surrounding phrase
The user procedure would be something like 1) highlight the target 2) Right click a context menu, 3) Left click “Add word to LingQ” (the language would be preset somehow) then some kind of dictionary pop-up would occur whereby the Hint could be added.
This would ideally go straight to LingQ but it could also just be included on a list formatted as above.
I agree, ideally it would go straight to LingQ but unfortunately the API does not yet support LingQ creation, only viewing of already created LingQs. What could happen is in the meantime we create the .csv, if and when the LingQ API gets updated to support LingQ creation the addon could be update to support the direct-to-LingQ functionality.
If any other programmers want to collaborate on this (as having a newborn at home has greatly cut down on my “programming for fun” time and I won’t be able to do this myself) we could set up a code repository on Google code or some other cloud based version control system and start hashing out the browser add ons.
Interesting ideas here! We tried to do these things with our bookmarklet initially but the performance was poor and development was taking too long so we made the decision to simplify. If you do start working on an FF addon, we will try to support you as much as we can in the API. Let us know what you need and we will try to add it. Obviously, some way of creating LingQs will be a place to start.
"having a newborn at home has greatly cut down on my “programming for fun” "
congrats! I’m sure you could get the young one started on the project
What do you think about the add-on “Vocabulary Highlighter”?
Unfortunately, you need an xml.-file in order to add vocabulary lists. But maybe it’s possible for the Lingq Team to give us the possibility to export those lists in xml?!
Otherwise, you have to type in every single word and the respective translation(s).
The method is almost the same as in Lingq: You can see all unknown words highlighted in a colour of your choice on all websites in the web. And, if you hover over them, you’ll see the translation(s), too.
Thanks I will try that, il melomane. In the meantime, it would really be great to have the option to have the import bookmarklet open in a new page or tab. But I guess I am the only one annoyed about it : )
Dooo, I would like that too.
I like “Vocabulary Highlighter” but it has no possibility to easily generate definitions. My ideal for LingQ would be a kind of turbo Vocabulary Highlighter, where you would have all the functionality of LingQ but no need to go to the page just to work on your language. (Of course I would still go to LingQ.com to see my friends, flashcard and download audio)
Thanks mikebond
@doo, as soon as the LingQ API supports LingQ creation, your objective could be realized (with the exception of accompanying audio of course.)
In the meantime, we can probably build some workarounds… It would not be difficult to write a script to use the LingQ API to download all of your lingqs and then automatically generate the xml file needed by Vocabulary Highlighter.
Firefox has plenty of Google Translate addons that let you click a word or phrase to get the definition, a Firefox add-on could be written where a clicked word or highlighted text would be added in a formatted csv that you can import into LingQ. Once this is done you can re-synch your Vocabulary Highlighter xml with the script… If this sounds good to anybody or they have suggestions let me know.
On a side note, I have been writing an app which I give it 100 or so LingQs and it uses Google Text-to-Speech to generate an “audio flash card” mp3 for me to put on my ipod. It “sort of” works. If this sounds interesting to anybody I will host the tool on my website when I finally finish it
Sounds awesome. Wish I had the know how and the time to help : (