Speak (for Hafsa)

Now six courses: Flemish, Russian, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Every sentence still scored on your iPhone in about a second, with no account and no internet.

Speak teaches a language the way you actually learned your first one: by ear.

You hear a sentence. The words light up one by one as the voice says them, with a super-literal gloss under each word, so you always know exactly which sound carries which meaning. Then you say it back. Speak listens and gives you a score out of 100 — and shows you, word by word, which ones landed and which ones need another go.

SIX COURSES Flemish Dutch, Russian, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Switch course whenever you like and the whole app follows: its own sentences, its own voice, its own look. Flemish has 3,000 sentences across four levels; each of the other five has 600, running from three-word everyday lines up to full natural sentences.

LEARN IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGE English, Dutch, French or German. Every sentence's translation and word-by-word gloss is shown in the language you actually think in, so you are never decoding two foreign languages at once.

WHERE THE SCORING STANDS Flemish is the course Speak was built and tuned on: its scale is fitted to real native recordings, and 95 or above means you sounded like a native speaker. The five newer courses run on the same on-device engine with a first-pass scale — solid for practising against and for hearing yourself improve, but still being refined as real native recordings come in. Read their numbers as a guide rather than a verdict.

WORD-BY-WORD, NOT SENTENCE-BY-SENTENCE Most apps tell you "not quite" and move on. Speak paints the sentence: green for the words you got, a brick underline for the ones you missed. Tap any word to hear it on its own, slowly. The feedback is on the sentence itself, never a paragraph about the sentence.

IT LIGHTS UP WHILE YOU ARE STILL TALKING As you speak, each word turns green the moment Speak hears it. That is a real acoustic model running on your phone, several times a second — not a transcript arriving after the fact.

EVERYTHING RUNS ON YOUR IPHONE The pronunciation model ships inside the app. There is no server, no account, no sign-up, and no internet connection needed for anything. Your voice never leaves your device — scoring is never uploaded and never even written to disk, and the optional voice contributions stay on your phone until you email them yourself. Put the phone in Airplane Mode and nothing changes.

FLOW Practice does not stop to ask you what to do next. Finish a sentence and the next one arrives already speaking. Tap the card to stay on one a little longer.

PROGRESS THAT IS HONEST Speak tracks how well you actually hold each sentence over time and mixes in the ones you are shakiest on. Your level and your best scores are kept per course, so starting a new language does not disturb the one you have been building. Your streak and your daily goal are shared across all six — one habit, however many languages you are learning. No leaderboards, no hearts, no timers, no losing your progress because you had a bad week.

FREE, AND NOT FREE-WITH-A-CATCH No ads. No subscription. No in-app purchases. Nothing is locked, and nothing interrupts practice. Under the practice deck sits one small permanent banner for Hoop voor Hafsa, a Belgian non-profit raising money for a twelve-year-old girl with beta-thalassemia major — tapping it opens her story, and the ways to help open in Safari. That is the only ask the app ever makes, and no money passes through the app.

LEND YOUR VOICE (OPTIONAL) Speak's scoring is built from real voices, and the newer courses are the ones that need them most. If you are a native speaker of Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, French or Dutch, you can record a handful of prompt sentences. They stay on your phone until you decide to email them.

REQUIREMENTS iPhone, iOS 17 or later. Microphone access. The app is large because the pronunciation model is inside it — that is the price of never sending your voice anywhere.