2026-08-09 –, AU
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.
Gavin Guo is a Linux kernel engineer at Igalia working on the scheduler subsystem (sched_ext / LAVD) and AI-assisted kernel debugging tooling. Outside the kernel, he builds COCA Dashboard, an open-source MCP-native vocabulary-learning platform combining the Corpus of Contemporary American English with the FSRS-4.5 spaced-repetition algorithm. He has spoken at Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 and Open Source Summit Japan 2025, and previously presented kernel work at LPC and OSPM.