FlexiLingoReading a word and being able to say it are different skills, and flashcards only ever train the first one. You recognise a word on a card for weeks, then open your mouth and it will not come out.
Shadowing closes that gap by making saying it the whole activity. The word is read aloud, then nothing happens for a couple of seconds — and that silence is not dead time, it is the exercise. You fill it.
The pause is the feature
Most listening drills race you. This one waits. The gap after each word runs from nothing at all up to eight seconds and starts at two and a half — long enough to actually say the word back before the next one arrives, short enough that a run keeps moving.
Why two repeats is the useful default
Hear it, say it back, hear it again to correct yourself. One repeat gives you nothing to check against; three starts to drag. Two is where the correction happens.
It runs itself
Once you press Start there is nothing to press again. Words advance on their own, so you can be walking, washing up, or looking out of a window — this is the one part of studying that does not need your eyes or your hands.
- Pause to repeat — 0 to 8 seconds, in quarter-second steps.
- Times per word — once, twice, or three times.
- Rounds — one, two, three, five, or keep going until you stop it.
- Words per run — 25, 50, 100, or everything the session has.
- Shuffle, so the order itself never becomes the thing you remember.
- Read the meaning aloud too, when you want the pair and not just the word.
Fifty words is the default on purpose
A study plan can be hundreds of words long, and a drill nobody reaches the end of never gives you the feeling of having finished one. Fifty is a run you complete.
Hide the word and it becomes recall
The same menu that shows the word can hide it. With the word hidden you hear it and have to produce it before the meaning appears — the drill turns from repetition into retrieval without changing anything else. Those switches belong to your account, so they follow you between devices instead of being a second set of toggles that quietly disagrees with the ones at the top of the screen.
Fullscreen, when the word should be the only thing there
Focus mode sizes the card to the screen. There is nothing else to look at, which matters more than it sounds when the exercise is to say something out loud and mean it.
It does not touch your review schedule
Shadowing never marks a card as reviewed and never moves it in the spaced-repetition queue. It is deliberate: this is mouth practice, not a grading of whether you remembered — and a drill that silently pushed cards forward would corrupt the schedule that decides what you see tomorrow. At the end you get the two honest numbers: words heard, and time actually spent playing.
How to switch it on
- 1
Open any study session
Any deck you own works — clone one from Explore if you have not built your own yet.
- 2
Open the card menu and turn on Shadowing mode
It is off until you ask for it, because a header button for a mode nobody uses is just clutter.
- 3
Its control appears in the header
Press it, set the pause and the repeats, then Start — and put the phone down.