Language Learning Gets a Boost From Lingua.ly

New browser extension accelerates language learning on the Web

Lingua.ly—the latest innovative business to take advantage of the Basis Technology Startup Program—was making a splash in the Chrome Web Store last week, where the editorial team loved it so much they featured it on their central banner. The extension incorporates language learning into the context of a person’s online work and daily life.

CEO Jan Ihmels reports that in the first week of release, Lingua.ly has had “more than 10,000 new signups and some very positive reviews.”

How the extension works:

Whether emailing or reading a webpage, double-clicking on an unknown word adds it to one’s store of “flashcards”; brings up a definition; and displays the sentence plus its translation to the user’s native language. Mousing over words in the sentence reveals parts-of-speech for further understanding of a given sentence.

Under the hood, Lingua.ly uses Rosette’s language identification, morphological analysis, tokenization, and sentence tagging functions from Basis Technology to detect the language of the words—even when the page containing the word has multiple languages—and identify each word’s part of speech within its sentence to determine the correct definition.

Congratulations, Lingua.ly, or should we say

¡Felicidades

Félicitations

Glückwunsch

Mazal tov

Parabéns

Congratulazioni

تهنئة

Gefeliciteerd

and Поздравляю

You can find the Lingua.ly extension on the the Chrome Web Store’s central banner through the middle of May.