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When Google Translate isn't enough: saying something real in another language

I wanted to tell my girlfriend "I missed you today" in Farsi. Google Translate gave me a word-for-word rendering that technically meant the right thing and would have landed like a phrasebook entry. No sense of whether native speakers actually say it that way, no alternative if the first option felt too formal or too flat, no audio so I could hear what I was about to say before saying it.

Literal translation tools give you one answer. One answer has no register. It can't tell you whether the phrase you're about to use sounds like a person or a form letter.

So I built konid: you tell it what you want to say, it returns three options ordered casual to formal, with the register of each one explained, cultural context on the differences, and audio pronunciation played directly through your speakers via node-edge-tts — no external API key required.

For the "I missed you today" problem, the output looks roughly like this:

1. [Casual] دلم برات تنگ شده بود — what you'd say to someone you're close to; warmer, more colloquial
2. [Neutral] امروز دلتنگت بودم — natural across most contexts
3. [Formal] امروز دلتنگی شما را داشتم — appropriate for respectful distance; would sound stiff between partners

Nuance: option 1 uses the contracted برات (for you, informal) vs. the formal شما in option 3. Option 2 is the safest starting point.
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The register explanation is the part that mattered. I wasn't just getting a translation — I was learning why one felt warmer than another, which is the thing a language class teaches you over months.

konid runs as an MCP server, so it drops into Claude Code with one command:

claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
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It also works in Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. If you're on ChatGPT, there's a Developer Mode endpoint at https://konid.fly.dev/mcp. Supports 13+ languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Hindi.

MIT licensed. https://github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning

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