My girlfriend's first language is Farsi. I wanted to tell her I'd missed her — not the dictionary version, but something that sounded like a person said it.
Literal translation tools return one answer. No register, no explanation of why that phrasing works, no sense of whether it's tender or stiff or slightly off. Google Translate gave me something technically correct that I still wouldn't have felt confident saying out loud.
So I built konid. It returns three options for anything you want to say — ordered casual to formal — with the register explained and cultural context for why the options differ. Then it plays audio pronunciation through your speakers via node-edge-tts, no external API key required.
The three-option structure is the thing that actually changed how I use it. The casual option is what you'd say to someone you're close to. The formal option is what you'd write in a work email. The middle is where most real situations live. Seeing all three, with the nuance comparison, teaches you something each time rather than just getting you through the task.
Work email translations are where I use it almost as much. I've been learning Spanish for two years and I translate correspondence daily. Every time konid returns options, the register notes give me a frame for why one phrasing is warmer or more deferential than another — context a literal tool skips entirely.
Supports 13+ languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Hindi.
Installs as an MCP server in Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork:
claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
Also available as a ChatGPT app via Developer mode with the endpoint https://konid.fly.dev/mcp.
MIT licensed. https://github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning
Top comments (0)