I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.
For Mandarin (not sure about Japanese), the plugin would definitely benefit from pin yin supplementation at the 'novice' level. Non-latin characters are difficult for people whose primary language is a language of Latin derivatives. But implement this, they would have to take Google's pre-existing translation tools and translate the translated text into pinyin using something like the Ruby on Chinese Pinyin tool (http://www.kawa.net/works/cantonese/canton.html).
But at the moment, the plugin seems to expect people to have prior knowledge of the language and its so-called immersion revolves around reading and literacy uptake. Pin yin is more for speaking/oral purposes so translating articles into phonetic characters is unconventional for languages that are not meant to be read in such a way.
I'm pretty sure that Google Translate already supports Pinyin since it shows the pinyin on the dedicated translate.google.com page (click the pronunciation guide button after you translate something to Mandarin - it's the capital A with an umlaut).
I am just beginning to learn Japanese, and someone passed along a great site that takes a link to a kanji page and it adds kana to it. There's also a Firefox extension (Rikaichan) that provides kana in a tooltip when you mouse over kanji. Needless to say, this makes it easier.
I will mention that a long time ago, I had trouble with the dictionary file extensions being "incompatible" with new Firefox releases. They're just dictionaries, though, so I hacked them to make them stop. They might have fixed that by now.
I don't think so. You just may get used to read without repeating each word to yourself. It's actually even useful, skipping the phase when you internally match the word with its pronunciation, and directly understanding meaning from the written form. (AFAIR this technique is also used for speed reading.)
Although while this extension is a neat idea, it the word “Immersion” in its title is probably misleading. It only automatically translates select words and phrases from web page—while immersion, I believe, means not using any other language except the one you're learning.
Still, the extension might be useful to acquire some initial knowledge of the language prior to actual immersion.
Yeah, the fact that they named it 'immersion' makes it pretty misleading. My idea of immersion has always been using that language and only that language. The official definition of immersion is 'a method of teaching in a foreign language that involves exclusive use of the language'. The plugin's implementation is more like the opposite of immersion.
I'm still skeptical of people without prior knowledge of the language using this plugin because learning via computational translations is unnatural and detrimental to beginners who don't know any better. Beginners don't know when something has been translated wrongly or if that phrase is how a native would express it. This makes the plugin a little redundant, since their market would have to be people who are neither beginners nor completely fluent (since someone that is fluent can engage in actual immersion). The only instance where the plugin would be useful is for people with prior knowledge of the language (can read and write it to a certain extent) but would like to expand their vocabulary bank.
