I've been learning Farsi for two years. I can read a menu, survive a taxi, and still write an email to my girlfriend's mother that sounds like it was drafted by a government agency.
The problem isn't vocabulary. It's register. "I missed you today" has at least three valid translations in most languages, and the choice between them signals whether you're close, polite, or intimate. Literal translation tools give you one answer — usually the safest, most generic one — with no indication of what you gave up by choosing it.
So I built konid: it returns three options per query, ordered casual to formal, with each register explained and a cultural note comparing them. Then it plays the audio through your speakers directly, no API key, using node-edge-tts.
Here's what that looks like in practice for Japanese:
> How do I say "I missed you today" to a close friend?
1. (casual) 今日、会いたかったよ — "kyo, aitakatta yo" — the よ particle makes this warm and direct; use with someone you're genuinely close to
2. (neutral) 今日、会いたかったです — "kyo, aitakatta desu" — polite without distance; appropriate for friends you don't see often
3. (formal) 本日、お会いしたかったです — "honjitsu, oai shitakatta desu" — stiff for a close friend; signals professional or respectful distance
The nuance note matters. Option 1 and option 3 are both grammatically correct answers to the same question. But they don't mean the same thing socially, and a translation tool that returns only one of them without telling you which register it chose is quietly making decisions for you.
konid supports 13+ languages — Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and Farsi among them. It runs as an MCP server, so it plugs into Claude Code (claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai), Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. It also installs as a ChatGPT app in Developer mode via https://konid.fly.dev/mcp.
MIT licensed. github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning
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