Another feature I use a lot is selecting an audio fragment, sending a predefined prompt to an AI to "explain grammar" or "explain nuances of meaning" and I still experimenting with prompts.
And because shadowing is so easy I also use it as a player to improve my English pronunciation. (I am not a native English speaker.)
I made a quick video showing the workflow for creating Anki cards and shadowing: https://youtu.be/TaR58uuDBvU?si=o5aGLAi2S-BZ7Zy9
The app supports 15 input languages (Japanese and Chinese are the latest experimental additions), and more than 30 output languages.
I would really appreciate it if you could try it https://lingochunk.com/try. I know there are other tools with similar functionality but I created something that fits my workflow and it is fun to build.
Also I struggled to find public domain audio for the try page. I'd be grateful if anyone could point me to public domain sources (I used LibriVox, Wikimedia and FSI courses), or if you're a creator, let me feature some of your own recordings with credits and links.
Are you willing to share more technical details?
- Which data sources do you ingest?
- How do you transform and enrich the data? How does your pipeline look?
- What are your key challenges?
- Which tools do you use? What is your 'stack'? (Stanze, wordfreq, Whisper, wn, ...)
Background: I am currently building a multi-lang vocabulary hub for language learning. The goal is to match core words/lemmas to their senses/concepts, and then be able to generate multi-language flash cards.
I am still stuck on the sense alignment and fingerprinting (example: should 'to shop', 'einkaufen', ' alışveriş yapmak' and 'go shopping' point to the same concept of 'shop'?), but in a later stage I want to allow user-submission and data enrichment for IPA, pictograms [1] and audio.
[1: https://arasaac.org/pictograms/search]
Use-case (the dream): I come back from language class, I input new vocab and I output new Anki cards that work across all my fluent languages.
Currently, I mostly find myself knee-deep in problems of linguistics, NLP, Python and getting an LLM to do exactly what I want. At the same time it is a super fun project, and really makes me feel the joy of programming again. LLMs are magic, time just flies by, and all the random projects I always wanted to do suddenly materialize.
For coding, I mostly use free Gemini and some deepseek-v4-flash via openrouter to keep a tight oversight and understand the problem space. Maybe this slows me down, but agentic code jsut does not align with me. Overall, I haven't spent more than 2 € in total.
So far, surprisingly, the biggest problem is the lack of high-quality, free input data (example: English has the Oxford 5000 words as core vocabulary, but it is difficult to find the same for e.g. Turkish).
2nd place is the lack of high-quality synsets/wordnets (cross-language is mostly incomplete), and the 3rd place is getting LLMs to reliable play to their strength (on paper, a LLM is the perfect tool to provide multi-lang sense equivalents)
I plan to do a full writeup sometimes, but first I need it to work :)
As for the stack: STT with Soniox (word level timestamps), then spaCy for segmentation, POS and lemmas, then AI enrichment, correcting the lemma when spaCy is wrong. Some languages have no spaCy model at all and others are unreliable. I am trying to do spaCy thing in LLM then. Plus some extra magic for Japanese and Chinese.
Having the full sentence context is actually one of the things I have been thinking about a lot -- this helps both the learner as well as the POS detection in Stanza. I always decided against, because I wanted to build agnostic flash-cards.
However, as your approach allows on-the-fly generation of flash cards, you always stay close to the learner progress. I could (e.g.) pick some Gutenberg fairy tales, allow the learner to read them in their target language and provide bi- and omni-directional translations across all languages. Creating flash cards from the source material keeps the learner in progress (context), allows to learn new words step-by-step (discovery), as well as providing a fun learning experience and measurable progress. Similarly, instead of fairy tales, we could use some series in combination with its subtitles. This allows video-progress. Awesome x2!
Sidenote: The awesome part about HN is that I get to chat with like-minded people and directly grasp some new inspiration. Probably I ought to visit some in-person hacker spaces :)
Tested for Japanese. No problems so far, except sometimes repeating the desired number of times didn't work (mobile). Seems to work now.. But looping infinitely produces only three repetitions.
Really good UI with little friction: easily hone in on sentences, easily move on or jump ahead, see vocabulary, create Anki deck. Took a while to discover loop settings, but it's a good choice.
Only now discovered the "custom span loop mode". Great! I was about to ask for it!
AI mode is unobtrusive and helpful.
At last, found something that could need a touch up.. The starter deck from the example story is a bit nonsensical. It features words like URL and site from the Librivox intro. お is "translated" as "honorific" which is kind of true, but it's only a marker. A beginner might not know this. たち shows as answer "plural marker", there it worked. Integrating a flashcard app is no small feat. Impressive. I wonder what algorithm was used. Does it scale?
That's all. Thumbs up!
Japanese language are often described as using multiple type of alphabets - kanji, kana, numbers, and English alphabets sometimes - and pronunciations of especially kanji is not very well constrained, creating tons of homophones and homographs, e.g. "koushou" shared across more than 20 words, and the character for "life" said to be involved in more than 150 differently read parts of words.
Even OT but Unicode code space used for Japanese Kanji is famously shared with Chinese Hanzi, leading to ambiguities.
This situation is causing AI-based TTS(and also image generators) trained directly on Unicode text to go weird on kanji, even for simple ones as "tomorrow". Classical pre-LLM Japanese TTS avoid this by operating on generated or manually specified pronunciations, skipping kanji altogether, which do occasionally lead to wrong readings, but won't lead to sound generation code creating butchered middle-of-road sounds.
It doesn't seem like most or any of AI TTS tackle this problem, but I'm not in that field. Do anyone know the statuses on it?
Great project, and congrats for launching :)
And the site itself is a great idea and implementation, though the font size and family of the ui (not of the actual playback area) has a lot of room for improvement, but those are just minor changes.
Also the pinyin for 誰/谁 is coming through as shuí, whilst this character has two pronounciations, I believe shéi is the more common one.
I use a firefox extension to convert simplified to traditional, looks like it's open source so that may be of some use to you: https://github.com/tongwentang/tongwentang-extension.
Although there are some clashes that it does not handle, e.g. 隻 and 只 are both 只 in simplified, you just have to know which one it is from context, but the extension fails to convert to 隻 where appropriate.
https://talkhabit.com/shadow Or example, of one exercise: https://talkhabit.com/shadow?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yout...
Stuff I need to work on: - It only works with videos that have auto-generated captions - It works best with monologue videos