Migaku for Specific Goals
We make text in subtitles interactive: simply click on words you don't know to see what they mean or get a sentence breakdown. If a word or sentence seems useful, you can create a media-rich flashcard that includes your selected word, its definition, the sentence it appears in, a translation, a screenshot of your show, and a snippet of your show's audio. We use spaced repetition to quiz you on your flashcards over time, ensuring that you eventually commit their content to memory.
We are compatible with YouTube (on mobile) or YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, and Viki on desktop. In addition to the above learning loop, we enhance your viewing with several options for syncing the video and subtitles. For example, you can choose to always display subtitles, display subtitles in two languages at once, or only show subtitles while the video is paused.
Features like these enable you to begin consuming content earlier than would normally be possible.
Yes! Whether on desktop or mobile, Migaku makes the text of any webpage (blogs, Wikipedia, social media, etc.) interactive, giving you the ability to click on words you don't know to see what they mean or get a sentence breakdown. If a word or sentence seems useful, you can create a flashcard that includes your selected word, a recording from a native speaker, its definition, a picture of it, the sentence it appears in, and a high-quality TTS recording. We use spaced repetition to quiz you on your flashcards over time, ensuring that you eventually commit their content to memory.
Yes! Our OCR (optical character recognition) feature, labeled "photo" in the mobile app, lets you take pictures of anything and then detects text within the picture and makes it interactive. Using this feature, you can take a photo of a page from a physical book or e-reader, and then read the text with the support of Migaku's text analyzer and dictionary.
We are not currently compatible with any audiobook apps and do not support the ability to generate subtitles for audiobooks (unless they are available on YouTube).
However, while listening, you can transcribe sentences into Migaku's Clipboard and then use our dictionary to break your text down.
Yes, you can utilize Migaku's Clipboard to learn from videogames. Our Clipboard can automatically detect when your computer clipboard has been updated and then paste that text into itself. This makes two powerful workflows possible:
- For normal video games → Use an OCR software to capture video game text to your clipboard. Once copied, the text will automatically appear in our Clipboard for study.
- For visual novels → Use a text-hooking tool like Textractor to automatically send on-screen text to Migaku's Clipboard where you can look words up or make flashcards.
Alternatively, you can take a picture of your phone screen using Migaku's "Photo" OCR, as described in the section about using Migaku with physical books and Kindle.
In the future, we hope to find a way to track the difficulty of media en masse and provide personalized suggestions tailored to your interests and vocabulary size.
Currently, we can help you find content in three ways: 1.Comprehension Score → Upon analyzing a webpage or video, we will compare the words it contains with the words you know to give you a rough idea of how much of the content you will be able to understand. This can help you decide if a particular piece of content is right for your level.
- Hand-built YouTube Playlists → If you open our Migaku on your phone and boot up YouTube through our app, you will see playlists of videos for absolute beginners, beginners, and intermediate learners. You can use YouTube as normal and watch any video you wish, but if you don't yet know any creators in the language you are learning, you can start here.
- Ask in our Discord community → If you join our Discord community, you can ask other learners what media they are consuming , ask for recommendations, or see crowd-sourced lists of media that other learners consumed and enjoyed.
How can I use Migaku at school or university?
At its core, language learning is very simple: if you consume media in another language, and you understand some of the messages and sentences within that media, you will improve. That's it.
Unfortunately, textbooks and language classes abstract this process into something that is easier to distill and quantify. While this is ultimately convenient for educators who must assign grades, it is problematic for the learner. Students who do not study outside of the classroom end up spending a lot of time learning about their language, but virtually no time at all actually using or interacting with their language—especially at the beginner level.
To outperform every other "classroom only" student in your program, you only need to do three things:
- Continue to attend class (because you need a grade, after all)
- Work through our Fundamentals and Academy courses if you are a beginner
- Begin using Migaku to consume media you enjoy, make flashcards out of useful words from that media, and then review these flashcards
Yes! You can use our OCR/Text Recognition feature, as described here, to read your textbook with Migaku. This will make its text interactive, allowing you to click on words to see what they mean, get AI breakdowns of sentences, make flashcards, and more.
How can Migaku help me experience new cultures through language?
The biggest way we can help you is by giving you the tools you need to develop the confidence to communicate: that you will understand what native speakers say to you. Our "learning loop" involves supporting you as you consume real media intended for native speakers, and if you can get used to people talking over each other in a drama, you will be ready to handle conversations should you take a trip abroad.
Additionally, you are welcome to join our Discord—we have people from all over the world!
To be clear—Migaku does not (yet!) include features intended to help you develop your ability to speak another language. We do two things, and we do them very well:
- Foundation → Our courses quickly build the foundation you need to begin consuming and learning from real media in your language. If you're starting from zero and work at a pace of 10 cards per day (~30 minutes of effort), you can reach this point in roughly 6 months.
- Input → Our tools give you the support you need to more efficiently make sense of dialogue and text in another language, identify learning opportunities within those materials, and create level-appropriate flashcards.
With Migaku, you will develop the ability to understand virtually anything you read or hear. Given that conversations consist of listening and speaking, this provides an excellent foundation for you to stand on, once you eventually decide that you are ready to begin speaking.
Migaku does not yet have the ability to transcribe spoken words. (And anyway, if you're having a conversation with someone, you should be focusing on them, not your phone.)
What we can do is automatically build useful flashcards out of keywords that come up in your conversation. This process looks as follows:
- Open the Migaku Dictionary, either on your phone or via the Chrome extension
- Enter your desired keyword; a definition will pop up
- Click the orange button in the top-right corner of the definition to make a flashcard
- Click the purple wand at the top of the screen
- We will automatically fetch an example sentence, use text-to-speech software to generate a recording of it, provide an image of your selected word, use AI to get an explanation of what the word means, and more
In this way, Migaku can help you commit the most important new words from your conversations to memory.
Migaku can make copyable text in webpages visible, but it is not yet compatible with apps like Instagram and cannot yet automatically detect text in images, such as those in Instagram stories.
Having said that, if you are interested in seeing what the content of an Instagram Story means, you can:
- Open your friend's story on Instagram
- Take a screenshot
- Open the Migaku app and select "Photo" from the sidebar
- When prompted, select this photo from your gallery
- Migaku will detect text in your image and let you explore it or make flashcards from it
Migaku does not yet have a dedicated tool for practicing pronunciation, but this is something we are interested in building.
Having said that, all of the cards in our courses and any flashcards you make from video websites will feature audio recordings from native speakers, meaning that you can use Migaku to do shadowing practice:
- Open the Migaku app and select "memory"
- When a flashcard appears, audio will play
- Try to remember what it means, then flip the card over
- Click the purple "audio" button just below your sentence to play the audio again
- Listen a few times
- When you are ready, play the audio again and do your best to perfectly copy what you hear, mimicking the rhythm and melody of the native speaker's voice
We will prompt you to review flashcards each day, so if you make a habit of shadowing along with them, you will gradually get used to the sounds of the language you are learning and become more comfortable stringing words together at natural speeds.
How can Migaku enhance my travel experiences?
While intended to prepare you to begin consuming media in another language as soon as possible, the design of Migaku's courses also makes them an effective option for travelers.
- Our Fundamentals Courses introduce you to the characters of a language's writing system and how they sound—by the time you finish, you will be able to sound out words that you see and differentiate sounds
- Our Academy Courses teach the specific subset of ~1,500 words and ~300 grammar points you need to follow 80% of television dramas—as it would happen, this subset of words lines up very well with the words you need to navigate daily life
- Our Vocabulary Courses consist of topically-organized decks, enabling you to learn important words (mostly nouns) related to topics like places, time, food and drinks, and more
If you can commit to learning 10 new items per day from our courses (~half an hour), you can build the foundation you need to understand the majority of everyday conversations in about six months.
Yes! Use our Text Recognition/OCR feature to snap pictures of things in the world around you. Migaku will detect any text they contain and make that text interactive, enabling you to tap on words to see what they mean and make flashcards out of useful-looking words.
In this way, you can quickly learn the specific vocabulary words you need to navigate daily life, wherever you happen to be.
Yes! Use our Text Recognition/OCR feature to upload a screenshot of a page from a website or another app. Migaku will detect any text they contain and make that text interactive, enabling you to tap on words to see what they mean and make flashcards out of useful-looking words.
In this way, you can make use of whatever apps you need to navigate daily life in another country—even if you aren't quite fluent enough to use those apps independently yet.
Yes, you may.
Please scroll up and read the section entitled "How to capture new words and phrases during real-life conversations?" to see how you can utilize Migaku to extract learning opportunities from conversations you have in another language.
How can Migaku benefit my career?
Yes! Technical documentation is intimidating because it makes heavy use of niche terminology that does not regularly (or ever) come up in everyday life. The good news is that, oftentimes, all you need to do to make this material more accessible is to learn some of these technical words.
So, whether you are reading a medical journal, technical manual, or legal contract, Migaku can help you:
- If the content is on a webpage, simply enable Migaku. We will make the text interactive, giving you the ability to click on words to see what they mean in context, translate the sentence they appear in, and make flashcards to remember technical words you repeatedly run into.
- If the content is in a document, copy the text and paste it into the Migaku Clipboard. You will be able to interact with this text just as if it were on a webpage, as described above.
- If the content is not copyable, open Migaku's app, select "photo" from the side menu, and then take a photo of your document. Migaku will identify text within your picture and make it interactive, as described above.
As you consume more industry-specific texts, you will learn the terminology and style of your industry, and these texts will become more accessible. Migaku provides a suite of tools that support you as you work through these texts.
We can! Simply copy the body of your email and paste it into the Migaku Clipboard. We will make the text interactive, enabling you to:
- Hear a high-quality text-to-speech narration of the email
- Click on new words to see what they mean
- Use AI to break down or translate sentences
- Make flashcards out of words that look useful
In particular, our AI feature can help you simplify complex sentences, making intimidating emails more accessible.
Definitely! Our mobile app places several powerful tools in your pocket, enabling you to squeeze in a bit of language learning whenever you have a few minutes of downtime.
You can:
- Flashcards → With internet or without, our spaced repetition algorithm will determine the most important words for you to review on a given day and prepare a to-do list for you. Simply open Migaku, select "Memory" from the side menu, and start studying! Flashcards are excellent for stop-and-go work as you can do just a few flashcards here and there and chip away at your to-do list over the course of the day.
- YouTube → Open Migaku, select "YouTube", search for videos or scroll through your feed as normal, click on your desired video, and then select "Watch With Migaku". We will fetch the video's subtitles or generate them if they are none and then make them interactive, enabling you to click on words to see what they mean, make flashcards out of useful words, and more.
- Clipboard → Open any page in your web browser of choice, such as a news article or Wikipedia page, click "share", and then select "Migaku". We will detect all of the text in your webpage and store it in the clipboard, where you can click on words to see what they mean and make flashcards out of useful-looking words. So long as you export your webpage ahead of time, you can read it even if you don't have Wi-Fi in the future.
When you start looking, you'll find that there is a surprising amount of downtime hidden throughout your day, consisting of two- and three-minute pockets of time. Migaku enables you to mobilize these pockets of time.