Most language apps give you one piece of the job, so you end up with flashcards in one app, a podcast in another and a chatbot sulking in a third tab, and none of them know what the others taught you. Tongue-ing puts it all in one engine built on how people actually acquire languages. You read and listen to material you almost understand, shadow native audio, write and speak, and review each word shortly before you would have forgotten it. It won’t pretend fluency comes cheap, and it tries to make every hour you put in count.
There are no streaks to protect, no gems to collect and no midnight notifications guilting you into one more lesson. Tonguey goes to sleep at night like everyone else. We want you to become proficient, then fluent, and eventually not need the app at all.
We’re tongue-ing in private beta right now. Leave your name and we’ll let you in when a spot opens up.
It’s about being able to connect to the world and tongue all of its people.
Serious learners usually end up with a second job: finding podcasts, saving articles, building flashcard decks and duct-taping five tools into a routine. Tongue-ing does that part for you. New reading and listening shows up on its own, in your language, at your level and about things you actually care about, so the news you would have read anyway becomes practice too. The path to getting by in the language is already laid out. When you want something specific, you can import it yourself in under a minute, whether that’s a YouTube video, a news article or the weird forum thread you are inexplicably invested in.
The opening line of Don Quixote, the way a learner sees it.
En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.
Anything you bring can become a lesson like this one. Paste a YouTube link and the video comes in synced to its text, or bring in a news article or any text you’ve copied from somewhere else. It takes less than a minute.
You can practise real conversations whenever you like with a frontier AI conversation partner. Describe the exact scene you’re about to walk into, set your level and play it out. It speaks and listens, pushes back, changes course mid-conversation and remembers the words you met on Tuesday, so you get to rehearse the moment before life springs it on you. We’ll share more about it soon.
Most people’s interest in a language dies somewhere in the conjugation drills, so in Tongue-ing grammar comes in plain words, a small piece at a time, and always attached to sentences you already know. You won’t be asked to memorise tables or wade through jargon before you’re allowed to speak. A rule appears when it explains something you’ve already noticed in your reading, which is when people actually find grammar interesting.
If you already speak a cousin of the language you’re learning, you shouldn’t have to start from zero. Tongue-ing knows every language you speak and maps the new one against them, covering shared roots, regular sound shifts, the grammar that carries over and the false friends that don’t. The comparative lessons teach you what’s different instead of the whole language from scratch, and learning one sound pattern can give you hundreds of words at once.
The characters are the same and the sound changes are systematic, so nearly all of your reading carries over. The lessons spend their time retuning your ear and your tones.
You’ll recognise thousands of words on the first day, so the lessons concentrate on what’s different, like the spelling, the false friends and the melody.
The built-in reading comes from the history, myths, legends, toasts, songs and jokes that native speakers grew up on and hold closest, instead of the usual filler about airports. By the time you can hold a conversation, you’ll also know what the words carry for the people who speak them and why an idiom lands the way it does.
Every learner gets Tonguey, an eccentric and lovable AI assistant who sticks with you from the first lesson on. He queues your reviews at the right moment, explains in plain words what just went wrong, celebrates what went right and heckles you gently when you stall. Being a tongue himself, he knows an awful lot about acquiring them.
Most apps run out of material once you go past the five or so biggest languages, and they have even less when you ask for the accent people actually speak. Every language here gets the full system, with reading, audio, a dictionary, grammar and conversation practice. Spanish comes in its regional accents, Arabic is taught dialect by dialect, and Chinese is treated as the family of languages it is. Where good resources don’t exist yet, we make them ourselves.
About a century of research on memory and language learning keeps reaching the same conclusions, and the system is designed around what those studies found. Every number below comes from the original paper, with a link to the source.
Each gold dot is a short review, and the gaps between them grow. Ebbinghaus measured the pink curve in 1885, and by his savings measure only about a third of what he memorised survived the first day. His result was replicated with modern methods in 2015. The spacing schedule comes from a meta-analysis of 317 experiments, which found that spaced review reliably beats cramming and that the best gap grows with how long you need to remember. Murre & Dros, PLOS ONE, 2015 · Cepeda et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2006
Recall of 40 Swahili words one week after learning them. Every review in Tongue-ing asks you to pull the word from memory rather than re-read it. Karpicke & Roediger, Science, 2008
Of ten popular study techniques reviewed for the Association for Psychological Science, two earned the top utility rating, and Tongue-ing is built on both. Re-reading and highlighting, the two most people default to, were among the lowest rated. Dunlosky et al., PSPI, 2013
A meta-analysis of extensive reading, 34 studies and nearly 4,000 learners, found large gains in vocabulary, comprehension and reading speed from reading a lot of material you mostly understand. That’s why Tongue-ing starts you on real reading, with every word tracked. Nakanishi, TESOL Quarterly, 2015
Interpreter-style shadowing measurably sharpens phoneme perception, with the largest listening gains among lower-proficiency learners, who need it most. It’s the Mirror step of the method. Hamada, Language Teaching Research, 2016
Progress in Tongue-ing is measured on the CEFR, the scale schools, employers and official certifications use to describe what you can actually do in a language, so a B1 here means the same as a B1 anywhere else.