Knowclip

Anki is the gold standard in spaced-repetition flashcard software. It's a favorite of medical students, as well as pretty much everyone on the Internet who wants to remember a whole lot of stuff.

It's available on Desktop, Android, IOS, and even in your web browser, so you can learn at home or on the go.

Once you've created your flashcard deck in Knowclip, it's 100% ready to use in Anki. But if you'd like to further customize your cards, you can do that using Anki itself.

Everyone knows the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. Thanks to the Internet, it's now possible to do this without ever leaving your home—you can immerse yourself in a new language via TV series, movies, podcasts, and audiobooks!

Knowclip is a way to make native media approachable as a language-learner. Its friendly interface lets you move through real-life dialog at your own pace. And crucially, it lets you concentrate on those bits you can learn to understand naturally at your current level.

This is important because there's more to the immersion story than most people realize. Knowclip was designed to help you get the right kind of immersion you need at this step in your journey towards fluency.

When it comes to immersion in a new language, it's not enough just to maximize your exposure to native speech. In order to actually learn from that speech, it must be

1. within rich context, like the plot of a story or the thread of a conversation
2. just beyond your current level of understanding.

This way, your brain can fill in the gaps and make sense of new words or grammar structures almost automatically.

This is the only way to truly acquire a language, versus just learning about it, like you would in a classroom. You don't need vocabulary lists or conjugation tables. You definitely don't need boring textbooks and silly classroom speaking exercises. What you need is lots and lots of input from engaging sources.

Knowclip is here to keep your motivated while you're accumulating all those hours of input you'll need in order to become fluent. As a language-learner, there's a lot you won't understand, but Knowclip helps you focus on the bits you can understand. With the addition of Anki, you can be sure to remember what you learn and easily keep track of your progress.

Since Knowclip works with pretty much any audio or video format, the possibilities are endless—where to look really depends on what language you're learning and what you're personally interested in. I plan to update this site with specific recommendations over the coming weeks. (Follow @knowclip on Twitter to stay updated.)

What's most important is that you find something that holds your interest. Something like your favorite TV show is ideal—if you're familiar with the story, it can help you stay engaged and make sense of the language.

Of course, finding that content to download isn't always easy. I'm hoping to build a platform to make this easier, either as a web site, or as an integrated feature in Knowclip—please consider supporting me on Patreon so I can make this happen while continuing to keep Knowclip free to download and use!

If you're a content creator, I would love to collaborate with you to make your work more easily available for use with Knowclip, while making sure you're fairly compensated. If that sounds interesting to you, please feel free to get in touch!

Knowclip has a handy cloze-deletion (a.k.a. fill-in-the blanks) feature than you can use to hone your speaking abilities to a certain extent, and you always have the option to practice shadowing (a.k.a. repeating after the recording) as you're making flashcards in Knowclip and reviewing them in Anki. But when it comes down to it, the only way to get good at speaking a language with real humans is to

1. Learn to understand the language
2. Practice speaking with real humans

Software can't replace #2, at least not yet 😉️ But immersing yourself in native media (with the help of Knowclip) is a great way to learn to understand the language.

Also keep in mind that #1 must happen before #2—you can't have a conversation with someone unless you can understand what they're saying! There are even people who advocate for a silent period when starting a new language.

Though Knowclip is just something I've been building in my free time, I've got big plans for the future. Some features I already have in mind include:

• in-app popup dictionaries
• speech-to-text integration
• sentence difficulty ratings based on word frequency
• ...so much more! See all planned features on Github.

If you don't see your idea already in the list of planned features, go ahead and tweet @knowclip or open an issue on Github.

Please consider supporting me on Patreon. You'll be directly enabling me to roll out new features and bugfixes on a regular basis, and you'll be helping me follow my dream of making quality language education free for everyone!