Player & transcripts

Open any video or audio and you’re in the player. It has three parts:

• Picture / waveform (video shows a picture, audio doesn’t);
• Transcript: each line is the unit of practice;
• Bottom controls: playback, the mode switch (Listen · Echo · Dictate) and recording.

Transcript interaction

• Click a line → jump and play from there.
• Select a word or phrase → look it up.
• A / D go to the previous / next line, S replays the current one.
• In the Listen lens you can toggle IPA and translation separately.

Word-by-word display

Transcripts of local media can highlight word by word: a karaoke underline follows the word being played, and Echo, Dictate and lookup all work at word granularity.

Word-by-word needs word-level timestamps, which come from two paths:

• transcripts produced by AI transcription (which timestamps words natively);
• running alignment on an existing transcript.

The extension (YouTube / Netflix) difference

Platform captions only time the whole line, so the extension has no word-by-word highlighting (the underline can’t follow playback). Word-level scoring is unaffected — Azure assesses your recording against the text word by word, with no dependency on caption timing, so it still goes down to each word in the panel. For word-by-word highlighting, open the material in the web app or Enjoy Player and run alignment.

Primary & secondary subtitles (translation)

The Subtitles menu in the player header holds two tracks at once: the primary subtitle (the language you’re practising) and the secondary one (the translation you read against). The secondary track has two sources:

• A ready-made translation: another imported subtitle (the Chinese track of a dual-language .srt), or a translation language track that ships with the platform video — films and shows, Netflix and many YouTube videos have proofread Chinese. Prefer this;
• Auto-translate: when nothing ready-made exists, set the secondary track to Auto — Enjoy translates the original line by line into your language as you scroll. Each line calls AI and uses credits, and machine translation isn’t as good as a human-checked one, so it’s a fallback, not the first choice.

IPA

After alignment, tap the IPA toggle in the control bar to show phonetics under every word.

• IPA comes from a local speech engine; the first time you enable it, engine data (a few MB) is downloaded and it is slow — after that it’s instant;
• When you can’t catch a word, reading its IPA beats replaying it three times.

Editing & aligning subtitles

Subtitles that drift from the audio, or contain mistakes, don’t mean new material:

Fix the text — enter Edit from the transcript header: change the text of any line (fix recognition errors, adjust line breaks) and save.

Align — when the transcript is offset overall, or you want word-by-word highlighting and IPA, press Align: Enjoy re-aligns the audio to the text word by word, producing word + phone timestamps. After that:

• word-by-word highlighting works;
• the IPA toggle becomes available;
• you can re-align any time.

Tip

After importing a film subtitle, run alignment first — proofread subtitles have accurate text, and alignment makes it fit this video’s audio, word by word. You need both.

Speed

Shift+, slows down, Shift+. speeds up. Beginners: shadow slowly first, then work back to normal speed.

Views

View	Key	Notes
Expand / collapse player	Ctrl+Shift+P	Collapse the player to free up space
Focus mode	F	Fewer distractions, focus on the content
Theater mode	W	Video only, bigger picture

Three practice lenses

Switch with the segmented control on top: Listen · Echo (E) · Dictate (H). Details in How you practise.