Blog
Notes on picking up English vocabulary while reading, and on building Merid on my own.
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5 tools Vietnamese speakers can use to learn English
Use five tools, one per skill. Merid for vocabulary while you read Vietnamese pages, ELSA Speak for pronunciation, Anki for remembering what you meet, Language Reactor for listening, and Cambridge Dictionary with YouGlish for checking a word properly. They do different jobs, so they stack instead of competing for the same half hour.
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Does Toucan support Vietnamese?
No. Vietnamese is not on Toucan's language list. The bigger issue is direction. Toucan assumes you are reading a page in a language you already know and swaps a few words into the language you are learning. A Vietnamese speaker learning English needs the opposite.
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How many words do you need to read English news?
There is no single number, but there is a threshold. Once you know about ninety-eight percent of the words on a page, roughly one unknown word every fifty, you can read straight through and infer the rest from context. Below that you are decoding rather than reading.
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Toucan vs Merid, written by the person who built one
Use Toucan if you read the web in English and want to learn Spanish, French, Japanese or Korean. Use Merid if you read the web in Vietnamese and want more English vocabulary. They run in opposite directions, so almost nobody genuinely has to choose between them.
Try Merid on the page you are reading
Merid swaps a few words on the pages you already open for English vocabulary worth knowing. Free, and it runs on your own machine.