Alternatives
Products that do what Shadow Read does
Learn Chinese through real videos with comprehensible input
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I've been working on a little side project that combines Duolingo-like listening comprehension exercises with real content . Every video is transcribed to get much better transcripts than the closed captions. I filter on high quality transcripts, and afterwards a LLM selects only plausible segments for the exercises. This seems to work well for quality control and seems to be reliable enough for these short exercises. Would love your thoughts!
2025 · app.fluentsubs.com
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Built this because tones are killing my spoken Mandarin and I can't reliably hear my own mistakes. It's a 9M Conformer-CTC model trained on ~300h (AISHELL + Primewords), quantized to INT8 (11 MB), runs 100% in-browser via ONNX Runtime Web. Grades per-syllable pronunciation + tones with Viterbi forced alignment. Try it here: https://simedw.com/projects/ear/
Jan 2026 · simedw.com
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Speak Chinese but can't read? Learn Chinese reading FREE
Mar 2026 · readchinesehsk.com
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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…
Jun 2026 · lingochunk.com
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Hey HN! I’m Alex, and one of my favorite ways to learn languages is by reading novels. Currently I’m reading 三体 (3 body problem), but one problem I've always had is it takes ages to look up words, and add them to Anki flashcards so I can remember them. 三体 is especially brutal with so much sci-fi vocab. That’s why I built Readly. I snap a pic of the page I’m reading, it loads the text in-app and lets me lookup words, add to Anki-style flashcards, or ask AI questions about the text, all in a single tap. It's a huge time saver. My specific learning strategy, if anyone wants to replicate it: 1.…
2025 · readly.ink
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Hi HN, Just wanted to share a tool i've been working on to help with my own study routine. It’s a browser extension called Lingoku. The idea is simple: we spend hours browsing the web in English every day. This tool replaces some of the english words with Japanese vocabulary based on your japanese level (Similar to Toucan, but with a better user experience). It’s basically an attempt to make the "i+1" method actually passive, you understand the sentence because it's mostly english, but you pick up Japanese words naturally from the context. It uses an LLM in the backend to make sure the…
Dec 2025 · lingoku.ai
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Hi HN! In trying to improve my Chinese skills, I built this tool that lets me write a mix of Chinese and English, then recommends a proper Chinese expression. This is super helpful when I want to write something in Chinese but I don't know all the vocab/grammar - I can enter my best effort and use English for the parts I don't know. Really, the fundamental benefit of the tool is that it encourages me to exercise the writing muscle, rather than defaulting to translating from English. My goal was to build something that is fast, relatively inexpensive, and not prone to misleading people.…
2024 · unscrambler.dpw.me
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2014 · getchicory.com
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Hi! I'm living as an expat in France and I had a hard time following the news. So I've been working on Fluentsubs that turns YouTube content into a language learning experience. YouTube videos up to 20 minutes can be transcribed and listened to. At the same time I made it easy to lookup certain words and automatically add spaced repetition cards using the given context. This means that you can also rehearse with a real voice and not with AI dubs. This works especially well for the somewhat smaller languages that have a small track on Duolingo, and now are desperately looking for content…
2025 · fluentsubs.com
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2018 · play.google.com
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Unlock Mandarin with Shengci: Daily HSK Vocabulary Mastery!
Aug 2026 · apps.apple.com
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Hi HN, I’m Pablo, I built this application to learn languages using podcasts: https://www.langturbo.com (No signup required) There are a lot of tools to learn languages, but most of them focus on beginners (understandably so, that’s where the money is) but not many exist that target intermediate or advanced learners. The ones that exist make you find content on your own and then import that into their apps, which can be tricky when you don’t know where to look. LangTurbo has a unique curated database of podcasts by language (some even have dialect labels) that you can browse by…
2025 · langturbo.com
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Learn Chinese from your Lockscreen, AI quiz, story and more
Jun 2026 · apps.apple.com
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Just for fun, I built a language learning tool. It represents Chinese and Japanese as graphs of characters, with connections indicating given characters can form a word. It can also decompose characters to give clues on how they're pronounced, analyzes words to understand which ones are commonly used together, and more. It's fully interactive, supports offline use, generates flashcards, has sentences from humans and from AI, and plenty of other features. Check out the README for details. https://github.com/mreichhoff/HanziGraph
2024 · github.com
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2021 · github.com
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Learn Chinese by speaking from day one.
Mar 2026 · speakhsk.com
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