❓ How-To Guide

Getting started

1. Go to the sign-in page.
2. Type your email address and choose a password.
3. Click Create account. That's all — no card, nothing to install.
4. Next time, use the same email and password and click Sign in.

Make a lesson from your own recording

Works on every plan. Good for class recordings, voice messages, or audio you already have.

1. Open the home page.
2. Click 📁 Local file… and pick an audio or video file from your device.
3. Wait — the status line shows progress while it's transcribed and translated.
4. The finished lesson opens by itself and is saved in your Library.

Make a lesson from a video link

Downloading from Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok is part of the Pro and Teacher plans.

1. Copy the video's link (in Instagram or YouTube: Share → Copy link).
2. Paste it into the box on the home page and click Save Clip.
3. The green dot under the box tells you the download server is on. If it shows ⚪ paused, your link waits in line and runs when the server is back — you don't need to do anything.
4. The finished lesson opens by itself and is saved in your Library.

Study a clip

Understand the words

• Click any word in the transcript — a panel shows its meaning, stress, and all its forms (conjugation or declension tables).
• In the word panel: 🔊 pronounces the word, ＋ Save keeps it for flashcards, ✓ Known marks it as a word you already know.
• Choose where the English translation appears with the English: selector — under the player, as a side column, or off.

Train your ear

• Click a line of the transcript to jump the audio there.
• Loop repeats one line until you're ready to move on.
• The speed control slows the audio down without changing the voice.
• 🗣 Repeat after me pauses after each line so you can say it out loud.

Check yourself

• Open the 🎯 Comprehension questions panel and answer the questions about the clip. Teachers can edit these questions for their class.

On your phone

A video clip gets a ⛶ button in the top-left corner of the picture. Tap it and the video fills the screen with the Russian subtitle line underneath.

• Tap any word in that subtitle line — the same dictionary panel opens as on the transcript, and the video pauses while you read. Close the panel and the line replays from its start.
• CC on the bar turns the Russian and English lines on and off independently. Your choice stays put after you leave fullscreen.
• ✕ (top-left) goes back to the normal page, at the same moment in the clip.

Read a text

1. Open Texts → My Texts in the menu.
2. Paste any Russian text (or upload a .txt/.docx file) and click Save text.
3. Read it like a clip: click words for the dictionary, listen with read-aloud voices, and take the 🎯 quiz.

🔗 Add source on a text card records the article or page you took the text from. It's just a note to yourself — useful when you come back in a month and want the original.

Daily News

A short Russian news brief, written fresh every day, with stress marks, a translation and comprehension questions.

• Open 📰 Daily News in the menu. It reads exactly like one of your own texts — click words, listen, answer the 🎯 questions.
• Level at the top rewrites the same story simpler or fuller. Start at Beginner and move up when it stops being work.
• Free accounts get today's brief. Pro and Teacher accounts also get the archive and the themed weekly briefs — politics, sport, science, military.

Courses & practice

• 📖 Resources → ILR levels explains what each level actually means, with sample material, so "I'm about a 1+" turns into something you can check.
• Golosa and SOLT are full listening courses — the audio, the transcript, the clickable words and the quizzes, chapter by chapter.
• Irina & Ruth are longer conversations for ILR 2 and up.
• 📘 Dictionary (in the Words menu) opens the full GrammarDrills dictionary, with conjugation and declension drills.

Your Library

Everything lives on the card's ⋯ Options menu.

• Search your clips with the box in the top menu — it looks inside transcripts, not just titles.
• 🏷 Tags keep clips organized — edit them on any clip, filter by them in the Library.
• Shared with me (under Library and Texts) lists lessons others shared with you.
• ⤤ Share on a clip sends it to another user by their email address (read-only for them).
• 🔗 Add / Update source link records where a clip came from. Worth doing on anything you uploaded yourself: see the tip below.
• 🗜 Free video removes a clip's video to save space but keeps the transcript — you can re-download the video later with one click.
• 🗑 Delete removes the clip, its video and its transcript for good. To reclaim space without losing the lesson, use 🗜 Free video instead.

Known & saved words

• ✓ Known words: everything you've marked as known lives under Words → Known. The more honest this list, the better we can tell you how hard a new clip will be for you ("% new words"). Right-click a word in any transcript to mark it known without opening the panel.
• ☆ Saved words are your flashcard queue. Click a word, then ☆ save in the word panel. They're grouped by the clip or text you found them in, so a study session and a deck stay the same thing.
• ▶ context next to a saved word jumps back to the moment in the clip where you met it.
• Saved words don't disappear when you export them — clear them yourself with ✕ clear when you're done. Clearing saved words never touches your known words.

Export to Anki or Quizlet

Open Words → ⬇ Export. Your saved words appear in a box per clip, with buttons on each box and a set at the top that covers everything. Hover any button and it tells you what it does.

This section is the file route, which works for everyone. There's also ☁ Anki, which skips the file and writes the deck into your Anki account for you.

Anki — the full cards

Our Anki file is not just word-and-meaning: each card carries the definition, the stress, the conjugation or declension table, related words and example sentences.

1. Click ⬇ Anki TSV (on one box) or ⬇ Anki TSV (all). A .tsv file downloads.
2. In Anki on your computer: File → Import, and pick that file.
3. Set Field separator to Tab.
4. Tick Allow HTML in fields. Skip this and the tables arrive as visible <tr> junk.
5. Choose the deck to import into, then Import.

Quizlet — two ways

Quizlet has no import-by-file for tab-separated text, so the quick route goes through your clipboard:

1. Click → Quizlet. The words are copied and Quizlet's create-set page opens in a new tab.
2. On that page click + Import.
3. Paste. Leave the separators on Tab between term and definition and New line between cards.
4. Name the set and create it.

If a pop-up blocker eats the new tab, nothing is lost — the words are already on your clipboard. Go to quizlet.com/create-set and paste. ⬇ Quizlet TSV downloads the same two columns as a file if you'd rather keep it.

Anywhere else

⧉ Copy on a box puts that box's words on the clipboard as tab-separated text — paste it into a spreadsheet, a document, or any other flashcard app.

Send cards straight to Anki (☁ Anki)

No file, no import. Connect your AnkiWeb account once and FluentClips writes the deck into it for you — the cards are simply there the next time you open Anki and sync.

Connect your AnkiWeb account (once)

1. Open Account from the menu and find the Anki card.
2. Enter the email and password you use for AnkiWeb — the same ones you'd type at ankiweb.net. Not your FluentClips password.
3. Click Connect AnkiWeb.
4. It says ⏳ Connecting for a moment while it signs in and downloads a copy of your collection. A big collection can take a minute or two — you can leave the page.
5. When it's done the card shows ✓ Connected as your@email. That's it, for good.

Don't have an AnkiWeb account? Make a free one at ankiweb.net and sync your Anki app to it once. AnkiWeb is Anki's own sync service — it's what already keeps your phone and your computer in step.

Why handing over your password is safe

• We don't keep it. Your password is used once, to ask AnkiWeb for a sync token, and then it's thrown away. It is never written to our database, and there is no screen — including ours — that can show it again.
• The token that replaces it is encrypted where it's stored, and readable only by the machine that does the syncing.
• We only ever add, and only in our own corner. Every deck we create sits under FluentClips::. Your other decks, your review history and your scheduling are never written to.
• Your side wins, always. Each push downloads your latest collection first, adds the new cards to that, and sends it back. So a push can't undo something you did on your phone five minutes earlier.
• Disconnect any time. The Disconnect button on the same card deletes the stored token. Decks already in your account stay — they're yours.

Being straight with you about the trade-off: a sync token is like a spare key to your collection, which is why we encrypt it, keep our writes inside the FluentClips:: deck, and let you take the key back with one click. If you'd rather not hand over a key at all, use ⬇ Anki TSV above — same cards, you do the import.

Push a deck

1. Go to Words → ⬇ Export. With an account connected you'll see ☁ Anki on each clip's box, and ☁ Anki (all) at the top.
2. Click it. A box asks for the deck name, already filled in with the date and the clip's title — dated decks then sort in order in Anki's list.
3. If you keep your own deck presets (new cards/day and so on), pick one from Deck options preset. Otherwise leave it on Anki's default.
4. Click Push. The button reports progress and finishes at ✓ pushed (12 added) — and tells you how many were already in your account, because pushing the same words twice doesn't duplicate them.

Then open Anki

1. Open Anki on any device — desktop, AnkiDroid, AnkiMobile.
2. Sync, the way you normally do. (Most setups sync on their own when you open the app.)
3. Your new deck is in the list under FluentClips, ready to study.

For teachers

Set up your class

1. Open Teaching → 👥 Students in the menu (visible on Teacher accounts).
2. Add a student by the email address they used for their free account.
3. The student gets an approval request on their Account page — after they accept, they're in your roster.

Teach with it

• 🎓 Publish to your class: on any clip or text you own, open ⋯ Options — on its card in your Library, or inside the clip viewer — and choose 🎓 Publish to your class. Every approved student sees it under the 🎓 Teacher tab of their Shared library, including students who join later. (⤤ Share, by contrast, reaches one person at a time.) Tag what you publish with its ILR level (🏷 Edit tags in the same menu) — students can then filter by level, and the 🎯 ILR Study Plan links straight to those filtered lists.
• Share a lesson: open any clip or text and use ⤤ Share — it appears in each student's "Shared with me".
• Pick the right material: the Teaching page can show the site as a chosen student sees it, including how many words of a clip they don't know yet.
• Edit the quiz: on any shared clip you can edit the 🎯 questions your class sees. The same goes for shared texts and the Daily News brief.
• Fix a shared lesson: when a student shares a clip with you, you can correct their transcript lines and tags too — your edits land on their copy.
• 💡 Word Suggestions (under 📖 Words) is the review queue for words users have flagged. Teacher accounts have it as well as admins. Be deliberate: a save there is live for everyone on both FluentClips and GrammarDrills straight away.
• ✉ Message a student from the 👥 Students page — it opens a thread in ✉ Messages.

Make Clip (teachers)

Cut a short lesson (up to 5 minutes) out of a longer video.

1. Open Teaching → ✂ Make Clip.
2. Paste a link or upload a file.
3. Enter the start and end times of the part you want (e.g. 1:20 to 2:45).
4. Click go — only that section is fetched, transcribed, and saved as a new clip.

Account, settings & messages

• ⚙ Settings (in the Account menu) sets your default read-aloud voice, speed and highlighting for the whole account — not just this browser.
• Account shows your plan, what you've used this month, and the button to change or cancel a subscription. It's also where you connect an Anki account.
• 💡 Suggest a word: if a word in a transcript has no dictionary entry, or the entry is wrong, use ✎ in the word panel. Suggestions are reviewed and added to the dictionary — which is the same dictionary GrammarDrills uses.
• Need anything else? Use the contact form.

✉ Messages

Your conversations with us — and with your teacher, if you have one. It works like email: each subject is its own thread, and replies land in the same one.

• The number on ✉ Messages in the menu is how many unread messages you have.
• 📎 attaches a screenshot — up to 5 images per message, 2 MB each. You can also just paste an image straight into the message box. Images upload when you hit Send, so a draft you abandon leaves nothing behind.
• ✉ Unread puts a thread back to unread and closes it, for when you want to deal with something later.
• 🗑 on a thread deletes the whole conversation, for both sides. The 🗑 that appears beside a single message deletes only that one.
• When you send something through the contact form while signed in, it becomes a thread here with its own ticket number — and you can attach a screenshot to it the same way. (Signed out, the form still works; sign in first if you want to send a picture.)

When something looks wrong

• The transcript has a wrong word: click the ✎ pencil on that line and fix it — or, if you have the original script, use 📝 Apply script to lay your exact text over the audio timing.
• The whole transcription is poor: check the audio language wasn't set to auto-detect on mixed-language audio; paid accounts can use ↻ Re-transcribe for a higher-quality pass.
• ⚪ "Downloads are paused": the download server is briefly offline. Your link is queued and will run by itself — file uploads keep working the whole time.
• No sound on iPhone read-aloud: tap the play button once directly — iOS requires one direct tap before a page may speak.
• The subtitles vanished in fullscreen on a phone: you're in your phone's own full-screen player, not ours. Come out of it and use the ⛶ button in the video's top-left corner instead.
• ⬇ Re-download brought back the wrong video: the clip's 🔗 source link points somewhere else. Fix it in ⋯ Options → 🔗 Update source link.
• My Anki cards are full of angle brackets: Allow HTML in fields wasn't ticked on import. Delete the imported notes and import again with it on.
• ☁ Anki says it pushed, but the deck isn't in my app: the deck is on AnkiWeb and your app hasn't fetched it yet. Sync Anki. If it's still missing, check the app is signed in to the same AnkiWeb account the Account page says you connected.
• ☁ Anki won't connect: confirm the email and password work at ankiweb.net directly. If you've changed your AnkiWeb password since connecting, the stored token stops working — Disconnect and connect again.
• Anything else: the contact form reaches a human — and a screenshot helps. Sign in first if you want to attach one.

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