← Back to Product Feed

Hacker News Show HN: Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice

No tagline provided.

76
Traction Score
30
Discussions
Jun 25, 2026
Launch Date
View Origin Link

Product Positioning & Context

Here is a tool I built initially for myself to help with my German and Greek language studies. It started as a hack for creating Anki cards from native language audio. It extracts the words, finds their base forms (lemmas) and groups the examples by the lemma. At some point I realised that I have a transcription with word level timestamps that opens a lot of other opportunities. So I added a mode to click the first and last word in the transcript and it starts looping with the right gap and repeat count.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-BZ7Zy9The 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.

Related Ecosystem & Alternatives

Discover adjacent products, open-source repositories, and developer tools sharing similar technical architecture.

Deep-Dive FAQs

What is Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice?
Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice is a digital product or tool described as: Here is a tool I built initially for myself to help with my German and Greek language studies. It started as a hack for creating Anki cards from na...
Where did Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice originate?
Data for Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice was aggregated directly from the Hacker News community ecosystem, representing raw developer and early-adopter sentiment.
When was Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice publicly launched?
The initial public indexing or launch date for Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice within our tracked developer communities was recorded on June 25, 2026.
How popular is Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice?
Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice has achieved measurable traction, logging over 76 traction score and facilitating 30 recorded discussions or engagements.
What are some commercial alternatives to Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice?
Our semantic intelligence engine identifies potential commercial alternatives in the SaaS space, such as Rescript, which offers overlapping value propositions.
How does the creator describe Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice?
The original author or development team describes the product as follows: "Here is a tool I built initially for myself to help with my German and Greek language studies. It started as a hack for creating Anki cards from native language audio. It extracts the words, finds ..."

Community Voice & Feedback

cladopa • Jun 25, 2026
Looks great technically. I am a language nerd as I have worked in multiple countries like China or Austria or the US and I am from Spain.If you want to sell your app you will need to explain it for humans, like this guy is doing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROEJe-nBmqQYou will need to get better at public speaking and telling stories. I recommend going to your closest Toastmasters club.
nakedneuron • Jun 25, 2026
This is awesome.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!
numpad0 • Jun 25, 2026
OT but is any work anywhere being done with Japanese pronunciation problem?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?
dgellow • Jun 25, 2026
If you don’t mind sharing, how much does that cost you to integrate the translation API, and the text to speech API you’re using? Just curious as I’ve been thinking about doing something in that area (not anki or translations, but also language learning related).Great project, and congrats for launching :)
altgans • Jun 25, 2026
Very cool!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 :)
qwertox • Jun 25, 2026
I like the structure of their privacy policy page [0] and how it appears that they are not data-greedy.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.[0] https://lingochunk.com/privacy
dirteater_ • Jun 25, 2026
What are you doing for Chinese word segmentation/pinyin?
jrrv • Jun 25, 2026
Is it possible to add traditional characters for mandarin?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.
__float • Jun 25, 2026
I don't know what resolution or display you built this on, but a heads up the initial impression on my 4K monitor is that everything is incredibly tiny.
3stacks • Jun 25, 2026
This is awesome! I’ll be lurking for new data sources. I’m working on a self-hosted language app more focused around cloze and sentence mining into Anki. I love seeing more stuff happening in this space

Discovery Source

Hacker News Hacker News

Aggregated via automated community intelligence tracking.

Tech Stack Dependencies

No direct open-source NPM package mentions detected in the product documentation.

Media Tractions & Mentions

No mainstream media stories specifically mentioning this product name have been intercepted yet.

Deep Research & Science

No direct peer-reviewed scientific literature matched with this product's architecture.