MIND THE WORD

Chrome EXTENSION for learning languages

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Extensive reading is one way to learn any language properly and increase your vocabulary. Learning vocabulary can sometimes become tricky because holding a dictionary in your hand to look up for different words is a baffle and tedious job. If you don’t know the best way to retain new words, you can forget what you have learned.

To make your task interesting and not burdensome, Google Chrome has some extensions that you can use to translate the words while reading webpages on your browser.

Memories are connections. So when you’re learning a new word, you want to make sure it’s connected to those you already know. So when you have new words within the context of your known language, it helps you to make connections and understand their meaning more easily and accurately. Therefore, you effortlessly learn new vocabulary and improve your language skills.

Mind the Word is one such popular extension that provides you with a platform to learn new languages in your daily routine. As you know that the first rule of learning is to do it in small parts, so this extension exposes you to only a few new words at a time. It randomly replaces a few words of your context with the words of your chosen language. And the best part of it is that you can hover the mouse over the translated word and the original word is shown to you. You don’t require to click on the word to check the translation. This helps you infer and memorize the meaning of different words easily. A hovercard is shown to you when you hover the mouse on the translated word where you get options to change settings like colour configurations, playback settings, user-defined translations and n-grams. 

Chrome also gives you options to use this extension according to you. Keeping in mind that every person has its own calibre, it enables you to choose how many words from the context should be translated to your chosen language. It gives you many personalised features. In settings, you can change the way of highlighting the translated words. You can even change the number of consecutive words that can be translated. Sometimes it happens that you don’t want to see the translated words on certain websites. So it gives you a feature in which you can make a blacklist of websites that should not be translated. You can blacklist those particular domains from the Pop-Up Menu.

Moreover, it allows you to save the words for future reference along with original as well as translated words from the web and to build your very own mini-dictionary. It gives the option to check the pronunciation of the translated word which is amazing. In settings, this extension provides you with a quiz tab where you can test your skills over the language. Once you learn the translation of a word, you can mark it as learnt so that those words are not translated again

Earlier it used to show translations only through Google Translate but now this extension gives choices between Google Translate, Azure Translator and Yandex Translate (free to use) to show translations. All you need to do is provide the translator key, check the settings options and you are done.

It doesn’t do idioms well or gives you a choice of words to translate as it offers the translation of only single and random words. But it makes sure that you learn some new words of your chosen language in your daily routine.

This extension supports over 80 foreign languages including French, German, Chinese, Spanish and Swedish. It even supports many Indian languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi and Hindi.

In other extensions, you need to click on the word and then choose the language to see its translation and most of them require a premium subscription for the addition of more language courses. Many other extensions provide limited translations per day without subscription and use only one translator for translation. Mind the Word is totally free of cost and gives you the choice to choose from three different translators. It shows translation by just hovering the mouse over the translated word.

At last, you can say that MTW is the best thing to the self-learners for learning a language. It helps them do so in their daily routine without much extra effort.