ChickenDuck 2.0: Built for the People Who Teach

When I first built ChickenDuck, I built it for myself — a guy who kept forgetting the Mandarin he was learning in weekly lessons. The whole thing started as a way to stop losing vocabulary between Tuesday nights.

But somewhere along the way, I started hearing from tutors for the same reasons. They spend an hour teaching a great lesson and that's it. Some did flashcards which was also time consuming, some wrote notes and nobody quantitatively tracked their student's progress. The teaching part was energising & genuinely value-adding. Everything after? Not so much.

So ChickenDuck 2.0 isn't really a “version 2.” It's an expansion of who this tool is for. It's still for students — your lessons still get transcribed, your vocab still gets extracted, your flashcards still build themselves. But now, it's also for the person on the other side of the screen.

Here's what's new for all you tutors out there.

Link With Your Students

Tutors can now link directly with their students on ChickenDuck. Once linked, you get a student management dashboard — a single place to see all your students, their lesson history, and their progress. No more juggling spreadsheets or WhatsApp threads to keep track of who's learning what.

Push Lesson Assets to Your Students

After a lesson, tutors can now push the full lesson package to their students: the AI-generated summary, the complete transcript, all extracted flashcards, and any documents uploaded during the lesson. One click, and your student has everything they need to revise.

No more emailing notes after class. No more “can you send me the slides?” Your student gets the full picture of what was covered, ready to study from immediately.

A White-Glove Experience, Automated

Here's the bigger picture behind 2.0. A tutor who can see exactly where each student stands, push targeted study materials, and have post-lesson admin handled automatically? That's a white-glove tutoring experience.

The kind of personalised attention that used to eat hours of prep and admin now happens in the background. Tutors get to focus on what they're actually good at, teaching, and deliver a level of service that justifies charging more for it.

ChickenDuck handles the busywork. You bring the expertise.

Know Exactly Where Your Students Stand

Once linked, ChickenDuck shows you what each student actually knows. Not vague “they're doing okay” summaries, but real data.

Every flashcard in ChickenDuck is automatically classified into one of 22 life topic categories — things like Food & Dining, Travel & Transportation, Work & Career, Health & Medicine, Culture & Traditions, and so on. As your student takes more lessons, ChickenDuck builds a picture of which topics they're strong in and which ones need more work, based on their real conversations.

So instead of guessing what to teach next Tuesday, you can look at a student's profile and see: they've covered greetings and food vocabulary extensively, but they've barely touched travel or work-related Mandarin. That's your next lesson plan, right there.

Collections — Organised Vocabulary That You Control

Flashcards are now organised into Collections — themed groups that mirror the 22 topic categories, plus HSK levels. ChickenDuck's AI auto-classifies new cards as they're created. No manual sorting.

But tutors can also create their own custom collections and push them to students. Teaching a unit on ordering food? Build a “Restaurant Mandarin” collection and push it to your student before class. They show up with the vocab loaded and ready to practise.

After the lesson, ChickenDuck automatically extracts new vocabulary from the transcript and adds it to the right collections. The cycle builds on itself.

What's next?

We're working on a mobile app next because we understand how people love to swipe left/right for flashcards. We also have a feature called Lesson Replay but we'll just leave it at that for now.

ChickenDuck started as a flashcard tool. It's becoming the platform I wish existed when I first sat down with a tutor and said “你好” for what felt like the hundredth time.

If you're a Mandarin/English tutor or student, come give it a try. Your flashcards are waiting.