For months I was translating professional emails into French daily — client updates, scheduling, requests for clarification — and retaining nothing. Each translation was a one-shot utility: paste, get answer, move on. No sense of whether I'd chosen a register too stiff or too casual, no explanation of what the alternative phrasing would signal to a native reader.
The problem isn't that literal translation tools are wrong. It's that they collapse a decision into a single answer when the interesting thing is the gap between options. "Pourriez-vous" versus "pouvez-vous" versus "est-ce que tu peux" aren't interchangeable — each one positions you differently in the relationship. A tool that returns only one never forces you to notice.
I built konid to make the daily translation loop actually teach something. Every query returns 3 options ordered casual to formal, with the register of each one explained and a note on when you'd reach for it. Audio pronunciation plays through your speakers directly via node-edge-tts — no API key, no extra setup. For the French scheduling email, you'd see the informal option you'd use with a close colleague, the neutral one safe for most professional contexts, and the formal one that signals respect for hierarchy or unfamiliarity.
The repetition compounds. After enough work emails, you stop querying the same register question because you've absorbed the pattern. That's the loop literal tools never close.
konid works as an MCP server — one line to add it to Claude Code:
claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
Also works in Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. If you use ChatGPT, install it as a custom app via Developer mode pointing at https://konid.fly.dev/mcp. Supports 13+ languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Hindi.
MIT licensed. github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning
Top comments (0)