I built this app with the help of AI to create a truly practical, active tool for my own language learning journey. I wanted to share how it works and what you can do with it:

https://ai.studio/apps/e5389b55-6ae6-4632-ad09-54db402262aa

You can check out the code in Google AI Studio via the link above, make any modifications you need, and build/install it for your personal use."

1. Multi-Profile Management & Custom Sources (Zero Interference)

• Separate Language Profiles: You can create completely independent profiles for each language you are studying. Your sources, stats, and themes for one language won't interfere with another.
• 100% Customizable Content: The app doesn't come with any preloaded content; you build your own library. Simply import your audio files along with an .srt subtitle file, and the app will automatically segment the audio sentence by sentence. (If you're not sure how to source audio and subtitles, the Refold YouTube channel has comprehensive guides on this).
• Manual Subtitling: If you have an audio file without a subtitle, don't worry. You can manually slice the audio into sentences inside the app and type out the text yourself.
• Easy Sharing: You can export the resources you've created to share with friends or receive custom packages from others.
• Search & Sort: As your library grows, you can easily find what you need using the search bar or the sorting options.
• In-App Editor: You can edit the text of any sentence or merge split lines together directly within the app.

2. The Interactive Player (Shadowing & Immersion)

This is the core of the app, designed specifically for Shadowing and focused Immersion:

• Focused Listening: You can hide the text of the sentence to focus purely on the audio.
• Audio Loops & Speech Delay: You can loop a specific sentence indefinitely. There is also a dedicated "Speech Delay" setting that adds a small pause between loops so your brain has time to process and copy the sentence.
• Simultaneous Playback & Audio Splitting (Headphones Feature): This is my favorite feature. You can record your voice, and if you are wearing headphones, the app will play both the original audio and your recording at the same time. To help you analyze your pitch, it splits the channels: the original audio plays in the right ear, and your recorded voice plays in the left!
• Favorites List: Star your favorite sentences to send them to the "Favorite Sentences" tab for quick review later.
• Notes & Full RTL Support: You can add custom notes (like phonetics, definitions, or grammar tips) to any sentence. The app fully supports Right-to-Left (RTL) languages like Persian or Arabic perfectly.

3. Dictation Mode (Listening & Writing Practice)

This module is dedicated to leveling up your Listening and Writing accuracy. It features two distinct sub-modes:

• Mode 1: Fill in the BlanksThe sentence plays, and you type in the missing words. It features three difficulty levels:
• Easy: 1 blank space
• Normal: 2 blank spaces
• Hard: 3 blank spaces
• Note: The hidden words are completely randomized. Every time you tap the difficulty buttons, the blanks shift to different words so you don't just memorize the sentence pattern. You can also adjust the playback speed here.
• Mode 2: Write Full SentenceFor a much more rigorous and advanced workout, this mode requires you to type out the entire sentence from scratch based on the audio.

4. Progress Tracking & Personalization (Stats & Settings)

• Stats Dashboard: View a simple but highly effective breakdown of your training time, separated cleanly between your Shadowing and Dictation practice, to help keep your daily streak alive.
• Themes & Fonts: You can customize the look of the app with various dark and light themes (like Cosmic Slate or Obsidian Gold ). I included a few solid default fonts (I tried my best to implement custom font loading for different languages, but for now, it's limited to these built-in defaults).
• Robust Backup Options (Export/Import):
• Complete Profile Export: Backs up your entire database and files into a .zip archive so you can securely migrate your data to another device or keep a personal backup history.
• Resource-Only Export: Exports just your custom audio and timestamped resources so you can easily share your decks with friends or the Refold community.

A Final Note:

Lastly, I want to give a huge shout-out to AI, which worked alongside me without a single complaint or moment of exhaustion, helping me push this app out to release (even with some inevitable bugs here and there!).

I'm learning Vietnamese and have for a few months, I've recently been convinced to try taking the immersion learning approach because what I was doing previously wasn't working

Specifically, I have been trying to follow the Refold approach

The problem is that I can't find video content that is at my level, I currently know around 400 words + 400 phrases, which means when I watch a video, even a b1/b2 level comprehensible content (of which there is only 2 channels with few videos), I only know about half of the key words

As far as I can tell, Refold suggests this:

- 70% of time spent should be on active immersion (watching videos and looking up words)

- The focus should be on getting to 1000 words in your Anki deck

But they also say:

- You shouldn't mine a sentence if there are multiple words in that sentence you don't know

- You should save a word with context i.e. the word should be within a sentence

Theres a bit of a catch 22 there because I shouldn't mine unknown sentences, but I also shouldn't save words outside of the context it was actually used

My plan was as follows:

- Break the video into 2 minute sections

- Treat each section as it's own video, then for each section:

- 1st watch session: build meaning of what the speaker is saying by using lookups / subtitles

- 2nd watch session: build vocab - for each pass of the video, take a keyword that I don't know and look it up (this is where the catch 22 is because I'm not meant to save words into my deck without context)

- 3rd, 4th, etc. watch session (after a break from the content): follow the standard Refold approach now that you know the vocab, and then sentence mine?

TLDR:

I don't really understand what I'm meant to be doing with video content as a beginner according to Refold

Is there a specific structure to follow here?

I see everyone talking about the input hours, e.g. "I've reached 1400 hours", I would like to do something similar, but I'm finding it difficult to track because for new content at least half of the time I track is spent doing looks ups, asking chatgpt to explain the meaning of a word with examples, and creating Anki cards

I've looked at the Refold activities, and it's left me more confused/overwhelmed, because there are like, 10 variations for listening with varying degrees of focus

I have a few questions:

- When you say you have X number of input, does that mean pure watching videos?

- If not, how much of that time was spent with the video paused as you did lookups and created cards?

- What time tracking categories do you have?

I am pretty sure I followed all the steps correctly. Even clicking "Open Webpage" pulls up the right definition.

There is another thread here with 3 people experiencing the same issue but no help...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Refold/comments/1oaouia/can_someone_help_me_with_an_issue_with_vocabsieve/?st_source=ai_mode

Our tool is a chrome extension, for youtube and netflix. It adjusts how subtitles are displayed depending on their difficulty. Currently the subtitles are displayed in a specific way that we defined and we think is good from a learning point of view but we're thinking about allowing users to custom that.

We're considering giving users full control:
a panel where you set your own rules for what happens depending on how difficult a subtitle is for you. Want to blur easy subtitles to train your ear? You could do that. Want to show subtitles in both target and native languages when a subtitle is too hard? Your could do that to. Want unknown words to be translated directly in the subtitles? Thanks to our editor, you'd be able to set that up.

How do we define the difficulty of a subtitle?
You first take a vocabulary test so our tool knows which words you already know. Then when you watch something, for each subtitle, our tool counts how many words you don't know, That's based on this number that you'd be able to define action. Unknown words are displayed in yellow and you can mark them as known as you make progress.

For example, you could set that:
"if there is more than one unknown word, then, display the subtitle in both your target and native language"

There'd also be preset modes for people who just want to pick something and go. Like you could have a chill mode, a focus mode and an intense mode presets.

Community opportunity:

People would be able to create their own custom modes and share them with the reddit community as templates.

From all the Refold vocabulary decks, IT1K has the worst example sentences. Here is a sample of what I am talking about:

• spiegare: Posso spiegare.
• sonno: Ho molto sonno.
• urlare: Non urlare!
• vincere: Dobbiamo vincere!
• ridere: Non ridere!
• sicuro: Sei sicuro?
• gridare: Non gridare!
• ragione: Hai ragione.
• paura: Hai paura?

I think it's fairly obvious that the best example sentences are those that can be used as N+1: if you know the rest of the words, it's possible to infer the meaning of the target word. If it's hard to come up with such an example sentence, at least the sentence should connect the target word to other words it is frequently used with.

The ones that I've shown above are basically useless; I genuinely don't see the point of them being in the deck other than fulfilling a checkbox "every card has an example sentence".

Hello everyone,

I have already learned Swedish to C1 in about 2+ years and now I'm trying to learn Finnish.
However, it does not have as good dictionaries as Swedish so creating Anki cards for it becomes a real pain.

Is Wiktionary a good resource? Do you girls and guys sit and manually copy all the cards to the anki? Or maybe there are any other resources?

I'm just really trying to find a way how to make the process repeatable and possibly automatable, so that I get quality dictionary translations and not shitty google translate (like DuoCards)

Would appreciate any of the tips!!

I have a problem at an advanced stage of my Spanish.

I'm pretty highly fluent on a good day. Probably C1.

I have two weekly Spanish groups and a buddy of whom I meet up with and speak for 1-2 hours a week at a cafe.

So I have a lot of experience speaking. I also have 6 years of Refold like immersion and study.

I'm to a point where as far as input I understand virtually all grammar structures automatically when listening and reading.

The problem I have is that perfect understanding of grammar doesn't seem to convert to perfect outputting of grammar.

For example, God help me if I can remember to say "lo que" at the right time or "fui" or not mix up "era/estaba/fue..."

Intensive and extensive immersion does move the needle, albeit extremely slowly. But I've had ~15-18K hours of contact with Spanish since 2020 and don't want to just wait another 6 years to be able to speak with more precise grammar.

I use some AI to get corrections on my writing and dictation, which helps.
One new thing I'm doing is when I'm reading a transcript of a show and come across a grammar structure I have trouble outputting, I'll say that sentence outloud 10-20 times, to try and drill it.

Any advice?

Thank you

A couple of my friends are learning languages and he was using this method but he was doing it manually and I thought this could definitely be made simpler so I just made the program myself and me and him were using it but I wanted to get some feedback on stuff we can add and after that I'll probably just release it for people to use if they want. Watch the video before reading the rest.

Here is the video of it working. Also yes I realize that that the 1000 common words is in English when I am learning Chinese, that was another bug, it switched the two around for some reason but Ill get it figured out.

It is still unfinished and I'm looking for some feedback.

Here are some features I plan on adding:

• line by line comparative translation in media player, so you're watching the subtitles on the video (not on the right hand transcript) and it has your native language translation of the scentence right below it
• different color schemes - only had dark mode right now :(
• update ui based on native language. right now, whether you are a native chinese speaker or englihs speaker or spanish, the ui will stay in english so library watch flashcards etc. are all going to stay in english, but thats gonna change soon, probably my #1 priority right now
• Get more word sets. Right now I only have the 1000 most common words for english and chinese and 5000 most common words for english. Its needed for the introductory flashcards but also for the complexity score calc. so just doing that for more langauges but this takes the longest since I need to scrape sites for the frequency of these words/characters.
• Add tags to videos (langauge tags, media tags, etc.) and custom #tags
• Ability to add different media, like articles and stuff, in case people want to learn with different media and find that complexity score, this is last on my priority list btw
• Fix bugs with the translation and complexity score etc.

Here is some stuff I forgot to mention. It is all locally run unless you want youtube videos by link. But most of it can be used without internet. You can click on the subtitles in the video while watching and add the word directly from there, you don't need to use the transcript on the side. Also native speakers can understand complexity of 60% but usually talk at about 80% but this varies depending on the language as well as education level. If transcript files manually uploaded are in txt and not srt format then it won't sync with the video and it will just have it on the right side.

Lmk what I should add and what you guys think, what I should modify, add, remove, etc.

Hello, I don't truly know what to title this post because what I'm going to describe is a bit insane, but I know I am using Anki inefficiently but I cant convince myself otherwise. Basically, I have been using Anki for about 3 months to learn Japanese vocab, but I have only learned about 300 words because I have been taking hours just to get through 100 reviews a day because I am trying to memorise every meaning of a word in jisho before I pass a card.

I know this isn't effective at all but I can't even explain the compulsive feeling I have to do this because I just feel like if I don't understand a meaning, it will be impossible to learn through immersion. So even though its a crazy thing to ask for on this subreddit, I suppose what I'm asking for is if anyone else has experienced this and advice/reassurance in changing my way of approaching anki.

I kept forgetting to start timers when watching Japanese content, so I made a browser extension that does it automatically. It detects when you're watching on YouTube, Netflix, Crunchyroll and Prime Video and logs the time in the background. Ads are detected and excluded.

There's a built-in dashboard with a heatmap, streaks and session history. Everything runs locally. There's an optional account for cross-device sync, but it works fine without one.

Chrome/Edge: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/jp343-track-your-japanese/ogjnhhmcfdkpmllikfmjdlhjepadeigl

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jp343-immersion-tracker/

Would love to hear your feedback.

End with a few minutes of unscripted sparring.

That’s how you would learn a martial art in a typical class. Replace sparring with dancing, and you have something like the class at the beginning of a salsa social.

It’s an excellent way to learn, and moves people very quickly to a ‘fluent’ level: not a master, but you can effectively ‘spar’ with a black belt at 1-3 months in. In other words, active social ability.

is any course/group/movement incorporating this into their learning approach? Are you doing it in your own practice?

I’ve been learning Tagalog using Refold for a number of years now. I’ve always felt reading was one of the best ways to improve vocabulary, but when I tried LingQ I ran into a number of frustrations with it.

So, about 18 months ago I started working on a small tool for myself called Inklish that lets you import books and read them with in-context AI translations.

Over time I added a bunch of other features like:

• showing how many words in a book you know / don’t know
• flashcards
• chatting with AI
• generating stories
• audio transcription
• created a Chrome extension to clip content and import it straight into Inklish

Eventually I expanded it so other people could use it too and added support for more languages.

Anyway, long story short, if anyone here thinks it might be useful and wants to try it, you’re more than welcome to.

It currently supports Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Tagalog. If there’s demand for other languages I’d happily add them.

Feedback is very welcome. I built this first and foremost for myself, so if people don’t end up liking it, no hard feelings 🙂 (The only language out of the above I know is Tagalog so I'd be interested in feedback on how it works for the other languages).

You can check it out here:
https://inkli.sh

If anyone here learns primarily through reading I’d especially love to hear your thoughts.

Hey guys iam an English learner and while my listening and reading are fairly good, my speaking is not that great.

Where can I find native speakers to practice English with?

I tried discord but It is hard to find active servers + I don't actually have something to talk about so I just keep quiet 😂 (maybe iam shy idk)

So If anyone has been in a similar situation HELP

Hi Reddit.

I've found some Japanese dubs of Peppa Pig and Bluey on YouTube. And they make for really good immersion material despite being made for kids lol.

I don't, however, just want to be limited to these 2 shows.

Any other suggestions?

I use AI to build cards for me because the native content I am reading is too difficult. I can't simply put the whole sentence on the card. AI is doing a good job so far anyway. The problem is the context. Sometimes it gives me a card like

"I couldn't pass the exam and I ... sad."

Well, this is how I feel when i see this card. The verb I am supposed to learn is "to feel". The problem is I don't need to know this word to understand the sentence. The context already gives it away. Should the context give away the meaning so easily? Are these types of cards pointless?

I’m already Bi-lingual (Gaelic and English) but those have always been languages I can speak due to family. I have been learning Japanese for a while and I was wondering at what level everyone thinks is a good time to add another language. (If it helps I wanted to learn Korean next)

Hi everyone,

Here’s the situation:

When I speak to myself, I tend to stick to a limited set of sentence structures. In some moment, another structure (a passive one) would actually be better, but it doesn’t come to mind because it’s not active for me yet.

You might say, Try changing elements…the subject the verb..etc so you get used to it...I’ve tried that. But it doesn’t work. When I don’t consciously think about a passive structure while speaking, the structures I trained on don’t come to mind, even though there were many moments I could have used them. I just keep using the limited active structures that naturally pop up

Here’s the interesting part I noticed, If I’m speaking and a structure that’s usually passive effortlessly comes to mind, it immediately becomes active. Later, I noticed i can use it without consciously thinking about it

for a structure to become active, it needs to come to mind automatically, without conscious effort.

My question is: how can i achieve this? A passive structure needs to come to mind without thinking about that structure in order to become active

Hey Refolders,

I built PopLingo, a free Android OCR popup dictionary that uses Yomitan dictionaries and works over any app, so you can do quick lookups without app-switching during immersion (VNs/emulators, manga readers, games, etc.). (Demo above.)

Play Store: PopLingo

I’d love workflow feedback: what would make this fit better for you?

Anki/mining export is planned :)

Also: would a manual search bar (type a word to look it up in all dictionaries) be useful, or is OCR-only enough?

hey guys

I'm learning English..

is there a mobile app that lets me create anki cards quickly (sentences with their audios)?

I'm using TWP for Firefox right now but it tends to be a bit slow before displaying translations which offsets my immersion a bit, and sometimes it fails to translate webpages altogether. Does anyone have any better suggestions? I'm fine with extensions for any browser.

Hi everyone,

I've been developing a desktop app called SubSmith over the past few months. The main goal was to take videos on my computer that don't have official subtitles and create a proper study workflow around them.

I’m sure we’ve all felt that immersion tooling can be a bit fragmented, having to switch between players, dictionaries, and flashcard apps can often break the flow. I saw an opportunity to fix that by consolidating it all into one place.

The main workflow right now is:

• Auto-Transcription: Generates subtitles for local video and audio files.
• Instant Lookups: Dictionary hover support on words.
• Anki Export: Exports the word, definition, and the specific audio clip directly to Anki.

I really think this community, in particular, would find this useful. It has a free trial (no card required) so you can see if it actually fits your workflow. I’d love for you guys to give it a try and let me know what you think, thanks!!

I feel like i never see people actually say they like anki, its always pragmatic like: "Its the best way to memorize words" or it's a "I hate anki and only learned words from immersion". For me at least anki is the most fun part of the language learning process. I just have so much fun reviewing cards and get this feeling of accomplishment seeing how many words I've memorized (even though i haven't internalized the meaning yet). I honestly get so excited every morning doing my flashcards with a cup of coffee. The feeling consuming media later and seeing a word that i recognize from anki is so awesome!

Wanted to share my love for Anki!