Tooling & Adaptivity
The tools that surround every story — transcripts you can scrub, a level toggle that rewrites the prose, imagery that anchors meaning, and a vocab deck that remembers what you saved.
Synced Transcripts
Where audio exists, the transcript is time-aligned to it. Practically, that means three things:
- Karaoke highlight. The active sentence lights up as it plays. Follow along visually while training your ear.
- Click to seek. Tap any sentence and the audio jumps there. Perfect for shadowing a single line ten times until it sticks.
- Offline read. Prefer silence? Turn the audio off and read the transcript at your own pace. Nothing about the layout changes.
Adaptive Leveling (A1 → C2)
Every story is prepared at all six CEFR bands — A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2. The level toggle isn't a summary — it's a full rewrite that adjusts:
- Vocabulary band. A1 stays inside the ~1,500 most frequent English words; A2 opens up to ~2,500; B1/B2 widen to general-purpose news vocabulary; C1/C2 keep the original register and idioms.
- Syntax. A1/A2 use short simple sentences; B1 allows one subordinate clause per sentence; B2 layers coordination and hedging; C1/C2 preserve the source's complexity.
- Length. Lower levels expand definitions inline; transitional bands (A2, B2, C2) taper that scaffolding gradually so each step up feels earned rather than abrupt.
Because the toggle rewrites rather than summarises, you keep the whole story at every level. Nothing important gets cut — it just gets said differently.
Vocabulary & Progress
When you tap the save icon on a word, it goes into your personal deck. The deck lives in My Learning (covered in the next section) and records:
- The word, its definition, and the sentence you saved it from.
- Which story and which level you were on.
- How many times you've re-encountered it since.
Encounter counts drive gentle spaced review — words you've seen once but never re-met surface first when you open the vocab pane.
Story imagery
Every episode now carries a 16:9 hero image, sourced through the Unsplash API and credited to the photographer. This is not decoration: dual-coding research shows a strong image improves recall of the language attached to it. The imagery pipeline runs in two places:
Every episode carries a 16:9 hero image sourced from Unsplash, with the photographer credited underneath. The image is chosen from the story's title, category, and a topic keyword extracted from the transcript — the goal is dual coding, not decoration.