*"hey there everyone,i’m a fellow japanese learner & have been learning japanese for a while. a lot of ppl recommend learning japanese by consuming japanese content like watching anime,movies youtube, listening songs in japanese, so i’ve been following this trick , but while doing that, there was a persistent issue i faced, whenever i saw came across an unfamiliar japanese word /sentence, i’d have to exit the full screen, open a new tab,type it(a lot of time not even possible due to the different writing system), searching up the meaning, i know there’s yomitan, and many popup dictionaries but they only work on text, if the word is not selectable , there’s no way out
i searched up for tools that could solve this but couldn’t find any , even paid tools like language reactor or migaku didnt offer the ocr feature & i wanted that feature for free, so as a developer myself, i decided to spend the last 4 months building it myself, i made it as a form of browser extension as i wanted it to work on subtitles and other benefits that are only possible inside a browser
it uses OCR, so you can look up Japanese from things like movies/anime with hardcoded subtitles, youtube, netflix , streaming sites,pretty much anything visible on your screen
how it works is basically ,u can simply press the shortcut Alt+X (customizable as u need), drag over the word & u get instant definition
on top of that, just because it uses OCR doesn’t mean you dont have other simpler ways to lookup words
u can always simply double click a text on any webpage to look it up like yomitan etc
I also realised when the text is already available in the form of sublitles like on yt , Netflix etc, we don’t need ocr at all in that case,
so I made added a feature which automatically replaces the default subtitles with “clickable & interactive subtitles” where u can simply click any word to get the meaning,
the meaning shows up inside a popup and it contains
• proper furigana displayed above the kanji
• word meanings and usage information
• kanji breakdowns with meanings, frequency, JLPT level, kunyomi and onyomi
• pronunciation audio based on the actual kana reading
a relevant gif to each word for visual understanding, I added it as a fun feature & its quite useful sometimes
english and native-language sentence translations using google translate
one thing that I also wanted was to be able to sentence mine & create anki flashcards directly from the meaning popup like as provided in many paid tools, I did some research & found out that it absolutely takes no crazy rocket science or anything that costs money, so I built that feature, u can just press the save button inside the meaning popup & it automatically does all that creating an anki card consisting of (movie/anime screenshot + Japanese subtitle + pronunciation audio), I know there are some GitHub repos that do it but that requires technical expertise & settings things up so, I made it completely simple, u can download anki , install the anki connect plugin and press “connect to anki” button in the extension
and I have kept all of there features completely free cuz that’s what I would want as someone learning Japanese
if u have any questions about how am I able to keep it free & into technicalities, so it uses a dedicated, local, deep learning OCR model in onnx format which runs completely in your browser using the onnx runtime (not connected to our servers; your data is safe) to extract the textual data and pass the extracted query through a robust language processing pipeline utilizing several open-source public APIs and libraries, it takes 0$ for me to manage it which allows me to make it free for y’all
but as we know,there’s one thing that dictionary definitions lack is context aware meaning of the word, but unfortunately ,its next to impossible without AI as “context-awareness” is the very basic transformers attention architecture, every ai nowadays uses, so to solve this , I kept all the free possible features in the free version/ plan and put the ai features in the pro one like context aware meaning, sentence each-word explanations, tts pronunciation & some portions where dictionary definitions fails are made up by the ai.
the ai version is completely optional,u can always use the free plan, no signup,no account, no data collection, no servers in between
here’s a video showing how it works: https://youtu.be/0T9miXil3PU
I’ve put it on both Chrome and Firefox(as a lot of people requested for a firefox version, took me a week tho)
if interested ,u can checkout the website: lexeye.study (open it in desktop for best experience)*
chrome extension link
lemme know ur feedback, if u found it useful, any suggestions etc."