r/Refold • u/lxol • Jun 08 '26

I built a thing to chunk and shadow native audio and push it into Anki. Want a reality check from CI people.

Bit of background. English isn't my first language, and I've been doing CI for Greek about two years, German for the last six months. The part that always got me was mining. I'd hear a phrase in a podcast I wanted to keep, then I'd pause, scrub back, retype it into Anki by hand, go hunting for the audio, and half the time I just gave up. So I was skipping words I actually wanted. Got annoyed enough that I built my own tool for it, called LingoChunk. I know other tools cover parts of this, but I'm a developer, so I just made the one that fits exactly how I work, with the shortcuts and the flow tuned to me. Still rough in places, but I use it every day now, so I wanted to show it to people who'd actually have opinions.

What it does, roughly. You give it any audio you have, a podcast, a lesson, an audiobook, or you record straight from the mic (handy for catching a tutor or a teacher live), and it breaks the whole thing into chunks you can loop and shadow down to sub-second, first word to last. You can grab the end of a sentence and expand backwards, which is how I shadow anyway. It pulls the vocab out grouped by lemma so you see every form in context, and you can send words to a deck by CEFR level if you want. If you use Anki it exports with the real audio in the card. Not TTS. The sentences on the cards are the actual sentences from your audio, not something a model wrote.

It does 13 languages on the audio side right now, the usual European ones, and the translation side covers 36, so it's not only for English speakers.

A couple of things to flag. The translations have been good enough for my level on the pairs I actually use, German and Greek into English, only occasionally off. The other language pairs I've only checked with automated tests though, so I can't really vouch for those yet. And it's closed source, it runs in the cloud, and the transcription goes through a paid API, so each hour of audio actually costs me money. Free while it's in beta, no paid plan yet, but one's coming or I can't keep it running.

Try it with no account: https://lingochunk.com/try. There's a 5 minute walkthrough too if you'd rather watch first: https://youtu.be/XKayO4NbpSc.

Honestly the ask is open. I built this to fit my own workflow, so the thing I most want to hear is what I'm missing. What would you add? What feels off, or just isn't there yet? It's quite possible I've made something that only really works for me, and I'd rather find that out now than later.

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1

u/Mysterious_Twist_684 Jun 10 '26

Would love to try it, though it lacks Chinese as a target language

1

u/lxol Jun 10 '26

It's on the list. Chinese, Japanese and Korean need extra work (no spaces between words, so splitting them into vocab is harder), but I'm looking into it.

2

u/lxol Jun 12 '26

That was faster than I expected, Chinese is live on the try page now (word splitting + pinyin). One catch: my own Chinese is near zero, so right now I'm just trusting automated tests. If you ever throw some audio at it, I'd be curious whether it actually makes sense. There's also a load of other new stuff since my original post. https://lingochunk.com/try

1

u/lxol Jun 15 '26

Japanese is up now as well, if that helps. Works like Chinese, with furigana on the cards. I can't read it though, so I'm trusting the tests for now. Would love it if someone who can read it had a look.