Tibetan, word by word, on iPhone and Mac.

Every word, with its meanings from each dictionary

A model small enough to run on a phone will get sentences wrong, so Kerog puts the word-by-word reading first. Each sentence is divided into its words, and each word shows its meanings from ten Tibetan dictionaries, with the dictionary named. A meaning that several dictionaries share is shown once, under the first of them, and the others say how many they repeat, so the list stays short; a tap on the count shows them. This lets you see where a translation went wrong and work out what was actually said. All of it is on the phone, so it is there without a connection.

Decide a word’s meaning once

A tap on a meaning in the gloss chooses it for that word, in that sentence. Working through one text for weeks, you would make the same choice hundreds of times: ཆོས as Dharma in your practice texts, as phenomena in the Abhidharma course. A glossary remembers it. Choose the meaning once, and from then on the word opens on it — on the chip, on its card, and in what you copy.

Always in use

My glossary

The meanings you want in every reading. Under a word’s meanings, Remember keeps the one shown; a tap on a meaning alone never changes a glossary.

One at a time

A glossary for each text

One for a text, a course or a teacher, as many as you like. Put one in use, and where it has a meaning for a word, that meaning wins over My glossary.

Your own wording

In your teacher’s words

A teacher’s list often says what no dictionary does — mind of enlightenment for བྱང་ཆུབ་སེམས. A glossary keeps it as written, and the word shows it first.

tibetan,meaning
ཆོས,phenomena
ཐུབ་པ,the Sage
བྲལ་བ,free from
བྱང་ཆུབ་སེམས,mind of enlightenment

For the times without a connection

The large models that run on servers translate better than anything that fits on a phone. Kerog is for the times they cannot be reached.

I made this to understand my Lama’s messages

He sends voice notes and photographs of texts on WhatsApp. I had nothing on the phone to help me with them: no app could take Tibetan audio or a page and turn it into words I could study, and by the time I was at a computer the moment had passed.

So Kerog starts from the share sheet. You hold the message, choose Share, and pick Kerog. The rest of the app was built around that step.

The same app, at a desk

Kerog is on the Mac as well, from the same download, and free there too. Everything runs on the Mac itself, without a connection, and your glossaries are the ones on your phone. What the Mac adds is room: the page beside its reading, a word’s meanings beside the word, and your glossaries in a window of their own beside both.

What each mode is for

Audio, Listen and Text run in both directions — Tibetan to English, or English to Tibetan.

How to work with it

The modes above say what each part of Kerog is for. The guides go through how to use it, step by step, on the iPhone and the Mac.

What to expect of it

This is the note Kerog shows on its first launch, before anything else.

Built out of other people’s work

Kerog trains no models and compiles no dictionaries. Everything it knows was made by the people below and released for others to build on. Copyright in each stays with its author; this app converts and bundles them, and does not own them. The same list is in the app, under Settings.