I built konid after translating work emails in Japanese for six months and realizing I was getting through each email but learning nothing. Same literal output every time, no sense of whether I was being too stiff or too casual, no audio to check whether I'd read the pronunciation right in my head.
The specific thing konid does differently: it returns three options per query, ordered casual to formal, with the register named and a comparison of the cultural nuance between them. Not "here's your translation" — more like "here are the three ways a native speaker might say this, and here's why you'd pick each one." Audio plays through speakers via node-edge-tts, no external API key involved.
The angle I want to cover here is MCP client coverage, because this is the part that took the most work and matters most to how I actually use it.
konid runs as an MCP server. Install once:
claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
That gets you Claude Code. The same server config works in Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, and JetBrains with their respective MCP settings. For Claude Cowork — the multi-agent workspace — you point it at the same server process. For ChatGPT, Developer mode accepts the hosted endpoint directly:
https://konid.fly.dev/mcp
The reason this matters: I switch between Claude Code (coding sessions), Claude Cowork (longer research), and ChatGPT depending on the task. Before, that meant context-switching to a browser tab, pasting text, getting a flat answer, closing the tab. Now the same tool is available wherever I'm already working. The language coach doesn't move; I move.
I've tested it against 13+ languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Spanish, French, and Hindi. The register distinction is sharpest in the languages that formalize it most explicitly — Japanese keigo levels, Korean speech styles, Arabic formal vs. colloquial — but it's useful in Spanish and French too where casual vs. formal lands differently depending on the relationship.
MIT licensed. Source and full setup docs at https://github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning.
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