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When one translation isn't enough: building konid for real language learning

I wanted to tell my girlfriend 'I missed you today' in Farsi. Google Translate gave me one answer with no indication of whether it sounded natural, romantic, or like a court document. I used it anyway. She laughed — not the good kind.

Literal translation tools optimize for task completion: get the words across, move on. That's fine if you're reading a menu. It's not fine if you're writing to someone whose first language isn't yours, or if you're trying to actually learn a language through daily work rather than just survive it.

So I built konid: a language coach that returns three options for anything you want to say, ordered casual to formal, with the register of each explained and audio pronunciation played through your speakers.

The three-option structure is the whole point. For 'I missed you today' in Spanish:

  • Te extrañé hoy — casual, what you'd say to a friend or partner
  • Te he echado de menos hoy — warmer, slightly more literary, common in Spain
  • Le eché de menos hoy — formal register, different pronoun, different context entirely

Each option comes with a note on when you'd actually use it. You're not just translating — you're building a map of the language.

Audio runs through node-edge-tts so there's no external API key to configure. You hear the pronunciation immediately, in the voice register that matches the phrase.

One install, four clients

The angle I cared about for the implementation: I wanted this available wherever I was already working. konid runs as an MCP server, which means the same tool works across Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. One install command:

claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
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For ChatGPT users, Developer mode exposes it via the endpoint https://konid.fly.dev/mcp — no local install needed.

The MCP protocol matters here because language questions come up wherever you're already working. Translating a work email in your editor, drafting a message in Claude Cowork, reviewing a PR comment from a colleague in Tokyo — the context switches, the tool shouldn't.

konid supports 13+ languages: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and others. MIT licensed.

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

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