Built by someone who needed it first

It started with K-pop and K-dramas

Like a lot of people, I got here through music and television. What began as a hobby, listening to K-pop and watching K-dramas, turned into something I wanted to do properly. I took Korean for two years at McGill University and worked my way through every Korean language course they offered, and somewhere in there the language stopped being a hobby and became a way into the culture.

"Read the newspaper"

When I finished the last course, I asked my professor what I could do to keep my Korean from slipping away. Her answer was simple: read the newspaper.

So I did. The reading was never the problem. Everything around the reading was.

A single article went like this. Screenshot the page. Open the screenshot in an annotation app. Hit a word I didn't know, alt-tab to Papago, look it up, come back, write the meaning above the word by hand. Repeat, forty or fifty times, until the page was covered in my handwriting.

What I ended up with was an iPad full of annotated screenshots and no way to review them. Two weeks later I had forgotten the words, and the screenshots were just pictures I never opened again. An hour of work per article, and nothing that lasted.

So I built the thing I wanted

Sori is that whole process collapsed into a highlight. You read the article on the actual page. Highlight a word and the translation or the dictionary definition appears where you are, in context, without a second tab. Press the plus button and the word becomes a flashcard, which comes back later on a schedule built for remembering rather than for filling an iPad with screenshots.

Same article as above, no annotation app, nothing lost two weeks later.

Where it goes from here

Sori now covers 123 languages, because the problem was never specific to Korean. Anyone reading in a language they are still learning hits the same wall: the lookup is easy, but keeping what you looked up is not.

The barrier was never comprehension on its own. It is friction. Every unknown word is a small decision: stop and look it up, or guess and keep reading. Make that decision forty times in one article and most people put the article down, which is exactly the moment the learning stops.

What I want Sori to do is make that cost small enough that you can read slightly above your level on purpose, and have the words you meet along the way actually stay. A textbook takes you to a point, and real pages start well past it. Crossing that gap should not require an annotation app, a second tab and an hour of your evening.