A few words per page
About one word in 25, with no more than six new words on a page, each shown up to four times. Enough to notice, never enough to stop you reading.
Learn a language in the margins of what you already read.
Pepper swaps a few words on the pages you visit into Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese. Hover to check a word, click to hear it. A handful of new words a day, met again and again until they stick.
Try it: drag the slider
on . By eight, is of , and the smell of fresh bread drifts from a small bakery. An honey from a wooden table. Most with more than they to buy.
Hover a coloured word and wait a moment for the English. Click it to hear it.
Only words with one clear meaning
Pepper swaps a word only when its translation holds in any sentence. Bank, court and party are never swapped, because the right word depends on context. Nouns arrive with the right article: the house becomes la casa.
Try before you peek
Hover and the English appears after a moment, so you get a chance to recall it first. Click to reveal it at once and hear it said aloud.
It remembers
Words you peek at come back sooner. Words you read straight past come back later, after 1, 3, 7, 16 and then 35 days, until they count as known.
The Chrome extension
Pepper for Chrome is on its way to the Chrome Web Store, and this page will link to it once it is listed. It will ask for no access when you install it: you turn it on for a site with one click, or for every site once you are happy with it. Until then, the slider above and practice mode work in any browser.
Your reading stays yours
The extension works from a dictionary built into it. It sends nothing about the pages you read anywhere, and your progress lives in your browser. Practice mode sends the passage you paste to be translated, and never writes it to disk.
Does this work?
Reading research suggests people follow a text comfortably when they know about 95 to 98 percent of its words, and that a new word takes repeated encounters to stick. Pepper is built on those two findings. Whether it teaches as well as a course has not been tested; treat it as a daily habit alongside one.