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:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.