UPDATE: THE FREE TRIAL IS NOW 30 DAYS! Several reported startup bugs have been fixed as well
Hey all! I’ve been studying Dutch on Lingq and thought a ChatGPT extension would be quite helpful, so I built one with my brother. The extension is able to:
- Get contextual definitions (including automatically in your learning language like Chinese → German for example, which will great for non-English users)
- Translate sentences better
- Get full dictionary definitions
- Identify separable verbs in a sentence (helpful for German and Dutch)
- Identify verb cases (e.g., present, past, etc) and generate the infinitive version of the verb
- Identify noun cases (e.g., nominative, accusative, genitive, etc.)
See the images below for how it looks, I’ve found it quite helpful so far, particularly the more accurate contextual definitions. Try it out by going to the chrome extension store or by checking out our website here. The extension has a free trial of 30 days so you can test it out and see if you like it (no credit card necessary!). After that, it’s $3/mo, cancelable anytime.
Let me know how you find it and if you have any ideas on more features to make it more useful!
Link to chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lingq-chatgpt-assistant/jphlijnomckienellojelnjehkfdkdoa
Link to website: https://languagelearningassistant.com/
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Hey guys, I’m Dafarmer’s brother and did the engineering for this. It’s been very helpful for us to use and I’m curious what you guys think. Please let me know about any bugs you encounter or new features you would like to see!
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Guys, well done with this. It looks very helpful, especially for languages pairs without sufficient community definitions.
I’ll try it out this arvo and give some proper feedback.
A question would be, how is the data incorporated into LingQ and what happens to the returned info? By the looks of the UI it would need a new generation for each click and need to be repeated if looking at the same word again.
I think it would also be naive to think LingQ isn’t looking at a solution similar to this in house. Given they have incorporated chatGPT into sentence translations already. Might be worth looking at other similar websites to expand your product to.
5 Likes
Quick Review of the Extension
tldr: Its a useful extension and worth a try.
UI looks nice
Contextual Definition:
Myslipatukan: Granola bar - Is this like a granola bar you can probably say a granola bar is good here
- I don’t understand why the contextual definition is a sentence translation in English? Shouldn’t it be used in a Finnish context?
Translate Sentence:
Can this be called a granola bar, a granola bar is probably good for this?
- Decent translation of the text
Onko tää niinku myslipatukan voi sanoa varmaan myslipatukan on hyvä tässä on
Dictionary Definitions:
There are no exact definitions for the Finnish word "myslipatukan" in English as it appears to be a specific term in the Finnish language. It may be a compound word that does not have a direct translation.
- You should look to support compound words. This is just a waste of tokens
Verb Case:
The verb case for the Finnish word "myslipatukan" is the partitive case. The infinitive form of the verb is "mysli".
- This is just straight wrong. I think the error could be related to how you would use muesli bar as a verb other than in a colloquial turn of phrase
When testing on a verb:
The verb case for "saunottu" is past passive participle. The infinitive form of this verb is "saunoa".
Noun Case:
The noun case for the Finnish word "myslipatukan" is genitive.
- This should be enabled by default. This is also the correct grammar.
Identify Separable Verbs:
In the provided sentence, there are no separable verbs. The sentence appears to be in Finnish and seems somewhat jumbled or fragmented, making it hard to identify a clear structure or separable verbs as they might be recognized in Germanic language grammar, for instance. Finnish does not use separable verbs in the same way Germanic languages like German or Dutch do. Instead, Finnish verb formation and verb phrases are based on suffixes and inflection. The sentence seems to be talking about a müsli bar ("myslipatukan") but does not contain verbs that separate into parts across a sentence.
A couple style/flow bugs
Stripe text is invisible on Dark Mode
After first registration a page refresh was required. UI didn’t update back from the Stripe panel.
After refreshing I clicked contextual definition. The infinity GIF kept spinning and this error was in the console
If you don’t have side panel open the enter new word box disappears
The UI also doesn’t show up on LinGQed words when not using side panel
Extra Notes:
You need to re-click each button if you close the UI
The info is not saved anywhere (That I can tell)
3 Likes
Thank you! And ya feedback would really be appreciated.
No requests are made to Lingq with this data, but we are thinking of making a “create lingq” feature. However, yes the query needs to be run separately for each word because every query is run in the context of a sentence, and we don’t have the resources to maintain a cache like that.
My hope is that Lingq is doing some sort of integration in house with this of course because then it could be much more powerful, but in the meantime we released this. Lingq has by far and away been the best language learning tool my brother and I have come across, so anything to help improve it we would gladly do.
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Thanks so much for the feedback! Yeah there are definitely a couple client side bugs/glitches that can occur which I am looking to rectify this week to make it a smoother experience. Usually if any are encountered you just click another word and run a function or refresh the page and click a word.
Likewise with some of the prompts for ChatGPT we are looking to fine tune them to be as good as possible. Unfortunately ChatGPT has more training on some languages than others, so a very rare language like Finnish will have less good output from ChatGPT as opposed to Chinese. And with the compound word case, like in Dutch there are many of these, the model really should be able to handle that as it is, so not sure why ChatGPT is failing here - will do some more investigating
Also, how it works in terms of language output is that whatever you set your native language to be in Lingq is what it will output. So in contextual definition, the output is the definition of that word in the context of that sentence and not a definition of the word in the foreign language.
3 Likes
The more I use it the more I like it. Most cases it does a very good job.
A couple more ideas
- Combine the Verb/Noun case and just return grammar
- An option for transliteration
- Keep a local object (Session storage or variable) in the extension with responses for each word and just reuse them.
Well done
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I agree with all those ideas. Will implement them this week! Keep the ideas and feedback coming!
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Thank you for the detailed review Rooster and the feedback! We’re definitely going to take some of it and try to get some revisions out quickly
2 Likes
Hey all, thank you again for the feedback! We’ve focused the last few weeks on fixing several startup bugs that were reported. The app now should work on launch for folks who were having trouble.
Additionally we have extended the FREE TRIAL to 30 days and have reduced the monthly cost after that to only $3/mo! Please continue to provide feedback on how we can improve this. I think the possibilities are growing, especially with the advent of chatgpt 4.0o
Check it out on the Chrome Store here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lingq-chatgpt-assistant/jphlijnomckienellojelnjehkfdkdoa
3 Likes
I saw your reply on my request of embedding LingQ with ChatGPT, and I remember I wanted to ask you more about your plugin.
Can you create LingQs with the your chatGPT definitions? For example with 1 click only? Or you have to copy/paste and so on?
Are definitions capped to 250 characters? For example historical definitions, and so on.
I know I could try but I’m generally reticent to rely on third party tools that increase my overall price for a software. But I like your idea because it’s one thing only, very straight forward and easy to understand. Potentially very practical as I’m using chatGPT more and more.
Plus, if you are able to create what I wrote in the other thread, that would be awesome. 
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Hey David, good idea on making that a one click feature. Right now you have to just copy and paste it yourself, but I think we could just add a button to remove that tedium. Honestly takes like 2 seconds though in my experience so it hasnt annoyed me yet.
Definitions are not capped, so often when I ask for a contextual definition of a word like “waddeneilanden”, which is Dutch means “the Wadden islands”, it will provide an answer with more context like: “Waddeneilanden” is a Dutch term that translates to “Wadden Islands” in English. These are a chain of islands off the coast of the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark in the North Sea.". This is quite helpful imo
Honestly whats also amazing is just being able to hit translate sentence with one button click too, I can’t go back lol.
I’d say just give the extension a try (its 30 days free and doesn’t require you to enter your credit card or anything, so not much downside), and let us know what you want. Anything you request, I think we can build quite quickly, like the thing you requested today
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I told you this because LingQ’s definitions are capped at 250 characters. I often write definitions, not only for single words but also for historical events, acronyms, diseases, you name it. Unfortunately, I often need to rewrite them to stay inside the 250 characters. Now, with chatGPT is different compared to what I was doing before (Wikipedia, web search…). I can ask chatGPT to give me a definition within the desired length.
Something to keep in mind if you do the one click only experience. LingQ will automatically take the entry, and cut it in real time or afterwards to 250.
Usually, I copy/paste the extended definition on the notes.
1 Like
Gotcha gotcha, I wasn’t aware that Lingq had that cap. Easy fix I think actually, we’ll change the query to chatgpt to say 250 characters or less
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UPDATE: Lingq have edited their website which has caused a slight breakage in the extension. I have fixed the problem and submitted it to be reviewed and released. It should be available within a day or two.
UPDATE: The patch has been released and the extension is working now
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