I made a Chrome extension for reading Urdu online
Adaab! I hope this kind of post is allowed: not trying to promote myself or get any monetary gain, but I thought this tool could be helpful to others.
I'm a heritage speaker of Urdu, born and raised abroad, and while my speaking is quite good, I've been trying to transition into reading harder things myself, like shayari and news online. However, there's usually lots of difficult words, and I get frustrated having to search them up one by one.
Basically, by using this extension, you can hover over any Urdu word, and a tooltip will pop up giving you the transliteration, English meaning, and more detailed dictionary entry if applicable. This kind of dictionary tool is already really common for other languages, eg. rikaikun for Japanese, but I didn't see any existing for Urdu so decided to make it myself. A few other things:
- You can pick between nastaliq and naskh if you're more comfortable reading one over the other
- It works on normal text as well as headlines and links
- You can make definitions appear only while holding Shift if you don't want popups constantly appearing
- Words you've already looked up are cached locally, so they load instantly the next time
- It's completely free and open source, with no accounts, analytics, or tracking
Here is the link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/feham-%E2%80%94-urdu-reader/aiildidompphlepahekhhhdbgcneoeeb
I'd love feedback from other speakers and learners, either on the extension itself or maybe other tools that would make reading Urdu online easier.