Learn Dutch: Polygloat

Learn Dutch the way you picked up your first language: by understanding it.

Polygloat is a comprehensible input app. Instead of flashcards and grammar drills, you watch a feed of short videos in the language you're learning. Hold any word in the subtitles to see what it means in that sentence. The app remembers every word you meet, works out how hard each video is for you specifically, and keeps showing you videos you can mostly follow.

Why Dutch is hard to practise in the Netherlands

If you live here, you already know the problem. Everyone speaks excellent English, and the moment your Dutch falters the conversation switches. Meanwhile Dutch news and podcasts are pitched at native adults, so an hour of them teaches you very little. You are surrounded by Dutch and almost none of it is input you can use.

Short videos fix that, because they are the one kind of Dutch you control. Watch two minutes on the tram, look up the three words you did not know, and you have understood a piece of Dutch end to end.

How it works

• Watch short videos from creators in the language you're learning
• Hold any word for its meaning — the sense used in this sentence, not a dictionary dump
• Translate a whole sentence when a line gets away from you
• Every word you meet is tracked, building a picture of your vocabulary
• Each video is scored against that vocabulary, so the feed stays at your level
• Words come back in new videos, days apart — spaced repetition without a deck
• Daily goals and a streak help you keep a few minutes a day going

No flashcards

A word you are due to review turns up in a different sentence, from a different speaker, at the right moment. You never work through a deck. You keep watching.

Languages

Learn Dutch, English, German, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese.

The app itself is available in eighteen languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

For Dutch, word meanings and sentence translations come in seventeen languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

What Polygloat is not

It is not a grammar course and not exam preparation: it does not teach to the inburgering or HSK syllabus. It is the input half — the hours of understandable Dutch a textbook cannot give you. Most people who get fluent use both.

Free to download and use.

Start watching. Start learning.