So I know What I want to do, but I don't want to do it by hand an don't know if a tool exists for this.

Basically, I want to improve my reading speed and listening comprehension. I thing reading along with subtitles, for instance subs2srs, would be ideal, but not yet an option as my vocab is around the 1,500 - 2k mark.

What I could do is add a lyric tag to the audio from the core series, then play the mp3 in any number of players that show lyrics, loop the lot, and read along. But I don't know how to do this besides manually copy paste 2,000 sentences.

Ideas?

This would certainly be possible with some scripting (and doing it by hand would be a ridiculous amount of work). I don't expect it'll be hard either, I don't mind giving it a try. Would you like the sentences in kanji or hiragana?

kanji would be great. Got to learn them readings some time.

Don't see why subs2srs wouldn't work. You can just put definitions on the back of the card for the words you don't already know.

I think the best way to improve reading speed is just to read though. I've found visual novels to be very useful - hook one up with a text hooker and Translation Aggregator (set to look up word definitions only) and you can read along just fine. After a while some of the words start to click with the kanji and it gets noticeably easier. Bonus points if the game is voiced. It's certainly a lot easier than looking up each word as you go from an actual book.

I have no idea whether it'll be an effective method or not but the production was very doable. Here are the files if TS (or anyone else) wants to try it out:

Core6k sentence audio with lyrics

It's basically frony0's sentence package with all original tags stripped but added track numbers and unsynced lyrics. The media player has to support Unicode and ID3v2.3.