I want to learn a language by translating web content

I currently try to learn swedish. I want to use a browser extension to automatically translate simple words while reading on the web. There’s Toucan by Babbel that does exactly this. There’s also https://nuenki.app/ that was recently posted on HN . It translates sentence-by-sentence instead of word based. I’d definetely would prefer using a HN user’s product over the Babbel product. However, the pricing starting at 5€/month is quite expensive adding to all these other subscription-based services due to the subscription business model trend . For nuenki, the recurring subscription fee is probably mostly used to pay for the LLM usage. As a user, this is sadly only a excuse. On top of that, I also know that I don’t really want to rely on the translations provided by the LLM from my own experience and also by others . And to add to this, I try to be as little dependent on big LLM companies as possible.

This is something where the Toucan extension is way better: they use translations provided by professionals¹. Their extension is for free since I’m paying with my data or as a lead for the Babbel app. That the Toucan app is curated by professionals also means, that they’re not supporting every language. And so it’s also with Swedish. The extension cannot be used with Swedish.

This is something I learn only during the setup of the extension after I installed the extension. I wasn’t able to find a list of the currently supported languages on their website. This annoys me as it is definetely a bad practice to let the user first install the extension (and then forget about it) before letting him know what the extension is capable of. However, it’s quite promising that Swedish is coming soon, isn’t it? No, it’s not. Selecting “Continue” shows me the following:

Now I wonder whether this is a good or bad user experience. I like that they are transparent on the priority of Swedish (compared to other languages). I don’t like that it’s on position 7. They now lost me. I won’t sign up with my email to get notified since it almost has no impact. If I’d work on the Toucan product, I’d think about removing this screen or the exact position. Maybe I’d only show the positioning for the top three requested languages. Maybe I’d add a timeline how long it’ll probably take. Obviously, they’re not providing any timeline since they don’t know either.

This experience has made me think again about whether using a LLM as nuenki is doing it, might not be a better approach - at least for unsupported languages.