L / 06Open lab

Deutsch English Language Lab

Bilingual practice studio — search, listen, scan, and read your way to fluency.

Web SpeechGeminiStatic

"Most language tools answer 'what does this word mean.' This one is built for the next question — how do people actually use it?"

IOverview

Why it exists.

I started this while learning German. The lookup tools I tried would surface a definition but rarely the rest of the picture: how the word lands in different sentences, what it shares meaning with, what its rough English neighbour is. Switching between four tabs to assemble that picture got old fast.

The Language Lab is one page that returns the full picture in a single round-trip. Type a word — German or English — and you get the translation, the source-language meaning, the target-language meaning, real example sentences, and a list of synonyms. Bidirectional with a single toggle.

Two practice modes sit alongside the search. The microphone mode streams a live transcript and translation while you speak, useful for pronunciation drills and shadowing. The camera mode scans paragraphs from printed material via server-side Gemini — a one-tap way to read through a German book with comprehension support without retyping anything.

A quieter feature is the CEFR rewrite slider. If you're A1, the example sentences come back at A1 complexity. As you climb, the rewrites stretch into B1 territory. Same input, complexity tuned to your level.

IIWhat it does

The surface.

01

Bilingual word and phrase search

Translation, source-language meaning, target-language meaning, real example sentences, and synonyms — all in one round-trip.

02

Live microphone translation

Streaming transcript and translation while you speak. Built for shadowing and pronunciation work.

03

Camera document scan

Point at printed text. Server-side Gemini extracts and translates the paragraph.

04

CEFR-level rewrites

A1, A2, B1 Beginner, B1 Expert. Same content, complexity tuned to where you are.

05

Bidirectional

Deutsch → English or English → Deutsch with a single toggle.

IIIThe stack

Under the hood.

Frontend
HTMLCSSVanilla JS
AI & Speech
Web Speech APIGemini
Deploy
Vercel
IVNotes

Worth knowing.

  • Static, dependency-light frontend — loads fast on the worst hotel Wi-Fi.
  • Camera processing is server-side so the model swap doesn't ship to every browser.