Questions, answered

A Chrome extension for reading real French — news, essays, PDFs — without leaving the page to look things up. Click a word for its translation, drag across a passage to translate the lot, save what's worth keeping, look up a verb's full conjugation, and practise a dialogue out loud.

No account and no API key. Translation runs on your own machine through Chrome's built-in AI, so once the language pack is downloaded it works offline. Conjugation and the word lexicon are bundled data files — they were never online to begin with.

The one exception is speaking practice: Chrome's speech recognition sends audio to Google's servers to transcribe it. See the privacy page for the detail.

Chrome 138 or newer. The on-device Translator API the extension is built on doesn't exist before that.

Not today. Both the on-device translation API and the speech recognition the Practice tab uses are Chrome-only.

Chrome downloads the French → English language pack the first time you ask for a translation. It happens once and can take a minute; everything after it is instant and offline. The extension says so on screen while it's happening, rather than just appearing to hang.

Chrome hides new extensions behind the 🧩 puzzle icon in the toolbar. Open that menu and pin L'auxiliaire so it stays visible.

Click any word. Drag across more than one and the whole selection is translated instead. Hover-to-translate is an optional extra on top of clicking — switch it on in Settings or with Alt+T.

That's deliberate. At four lines or sentences the bubble shows a preview and a 🌐 Translate button instead of translating straight away — selecting that much usually means you want to practise it, not read a wall of English. Press 🌐 and it translates.

Reading aids: every noun tinted by grammatical gender — masculine, feminine or plural. French gender is the thing hardest to absorb from a dictionary and easiest to absorb from seeing it, over and over, in real sentences.

It's off by default. Turn it on under Settings → gender / plural colour coding, in the popup or the side panel; the colours are yours to pick, and each category has its own switch. Changes apply live to every open tab.

A rough CEFR estimate (A1–C2) for the page you're on, worked out from how common its words are. It's a first-glance signal, not a measurement — it knows nothing about what you personally already know.

Yes — open the extension popup and choose 📄 Open a PDF, either from a file on your computer or by reopening a PDF already in the current tab. Click-to-translate, saving and conjugation all work inside it, and the viewer has its own highlighter.

You open PDFs by hand on purpose: intercepting every PDF you click would mean asking for far broader browsing permissions than this extension wants.

The "reopen this PDF" button fetches the file directly, which only some hosts allow. Publisher, university and Drive-hosted PDFs commonly refuse it. Save the file and use the file picker instead — that always works.

Into your workbook — the side panel, opened from the 📖 button on the translation bubble or from the popup. Words file themselves by where you found them: one workbook per page and per PDF, plus All Words across everything.

Every word is saved with the sentence you met it in. That context is the thing that makes it stick, so it comes along every time.

Conjugated forms are collapsed onto their infinitive, so "parle", "parlé" and "parlez" are one word to revise rather than three. The entry keeps the form you actually read; the card behind it is the infinitive.

Both. ＋ Collection in the workbook rail makes an empty list you name yourself, and ＋ Add a word lets you type a word and its translation straight in — including an English word, to learn its French. Right-click any workbook to rename or delete it, or drag it to reorder.

Yes — Export in the workbook gives you a CSV spreadsheet or an Anki deck, context sentences included. Nothing is locked in.

Not yet. Saved words already carry the scheduling data a Leitner system needs, but there's no review screen to drive it. It's the next thing on the roadmap.

Select a dialogue and choose 🎙 Practice, or paste one into the Practice tab. The panel reads one side aloud and you speak the other; if the dialogue is in English, you translate every line into spoken French.

To hear you say the line. Chrome asks once, on a dedicated permission page, and nothing listens outside a practice turn you started.

Almost always the wrong input device. The level meter beside the mic moves when audio is arriving — if it stays flat, change the input in your system sound settings and try again.

Scoring is on pronunciation, not spelling, and it's deliberately lenient — "parler", "parlé" and "parlez" all score the same, and a differently-phrased but correct translation passes. If a whole line comes back as gibberish, suspect the microphone before yourself.

• Alt+T — turn hover-to-translate on or off
• Alt+R — read the selection aloud
• Alt+S — translate and save the selection

Change them from the popup's "Change these keys".

Yes — Settings → Appearance offers Match system, Light or Dark, and the sun/moon button in the workbook rail flips between the two. The choice applies to every surface at once.

Settings → Tutorial → Replay, in the popup or the side panel. It reopens the welcome page and starts from the beginning, optional chapters included.

Reload the page — the extension doesn't run on tabs that were already open when it was installed or updated. Some pages (the Chrome Web Store, chrome:// pages, and other extensions' pages) don't allow extensions to run at all, and nothing can be done about those.

Open an issue on the GitHub repository.