Cymbra Lingua is a Safari extension that highlights, on the page you are reading, the Spanish, French or Italian words you don't know yet — without changing the layout. A pill shows how much of the text is familiar to you, counted from what you actually marked rather than guessed.
AFTER INSTALLING
This app installs the extension; you still need to turn it on.
1. Open Settings > Apps > Safari > Extensions (on Mac: Safari > Settings > Extensions).
2. Turn on Cymbra Lingua, then allow it on the websites you read.
3. In Safari, open the extension from the address bar menu and choose your level of Spanish — until you do, the extension assumes you know no words at all. For French or Italian, check it in the extension's Settings, under Language, then choose its level.
Reload the tabs you already had open so they get highlighted.
READ
Tap a highlighted word: its meaning in English, its dictionary form and how rare it is in everyday use. The meanings come from Wiktionary, written by people, never machine-translated. The card also names the tense and the gender ("preterite indicative" in Spanish, "past historic (passé simple)" in French, "past historic (passato remoto)" in Italian, "feminine noun"). Then decide — "I know it", "+ Deck" to review it later, or "Ignore". Select several words to capture a whole phrase with the sentence it came from.
REVIEW
The cards you make are reviewed in a panel beside your reading, with spaced repetition that picks the right moment for you. A statistics screen estimates your vocabulary level by level, from A1 to C2, from the words you have marked — for Spanish, French and Italian, levels estimated from word frequency.
READ YOUR BOOKS
Import your DRM-free EPUB books into the extension's library and read them offline, with the same highlighting. They stay on your device.
EXTENDED TRANSLATION (OPTIONAL)
Your selection is translated into English within its sentence, straight from Spanish, French or Italian, on your device, by the Firefox Translations engine, included in the app. Turning it on downloads from Cymbra, once, the translation model of each language you study (26.2 MB each); the text of the pages you read still never leaves your device. Turning it off deletes the models.
YOUR READING STAYS YOURS
The dictionaries and the analysis and translation engines are in the app, and everything works offline. What you read never leaves your device. The extension may send anonymous counts — install, first steps, returns — with no identifier of any kind; one switch in the extension's Settings turns them off.
AN ACCOUNT, IF YOU WANT ONE
Create a Cymbra account if — and only if — you want your words and cards on your other devices. Apart from the anonymous counts, that is the only thing that leaves your device, and you can erase it from the settings without deleting your account.
How many Spanish, French and Italian words our dictionary explains in English: our figures are at cymbra.app/en/lingua.
The interface is in English for English speakers, who learn Spanish, French and Italian; in French for French speakers, who learn English, Spanish and Italian; in Spanish for Spanish speakers, who learn English, French and Italian; and in Italian for Italian speakers, who learn English.
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