COCA MCP: Learning English While Chatting with an LLM

People who try to learn English as a second language usually quit their flashcard app within two weeks. The hard part isn't memorising definitions. It's that a new word only sticks after a dozen real-world encounters, and a flashcard never gives you that. We introduce the concept "Ambient Learning" — learning from natural conversation.

COCA MCP is an useful tool to suggest the vocabularies chat to an LLM. The server sits behind the Corpus of Contemporary American English — 60,000 words ranked by frequency — and exposes a small set of MCP tools. When a client like Claude is talking to a learner, it asks the server which words are due, and gets back a short list scheduled by FSRS-4.5. The model uses those words in its reply. It then tells the server which ones it actually used; the server records the exposure and reschedules.

The session walks through a modern English learning methodology on the running site at coca.gavinguo.cc — how to use MCP technology to improve the English ability.