Speak (for Hafsa)

The twelve scenes now play in six languages: Flemish, Russian, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Same stories, same stars — still no account, no ads, no internet.

Speak teaches Flemish the way you actually get good at a language: by playing the scenes your life is made of, out loud.

TWELVE SCENES FROM FLANDERS Buy bread at the bakery. Get your hair cut. Explain to the pharmacist what hurts. Order on a café terrace, catch the right tram, survive the town-hall counter, make small talk at a party. Twelve everyday scenarios, told in 973 illustrated story beats, with over 2,700 lines you can choose to say and 60 different endings to find.

SIX LANGUAGES, ONE ALBUM Flemish leads, and the same twelve stories also play in Russian, German, French, Spanish and Italian — every scene fully translated and spoken in each language. Tap the title to switch; every course keeps its own progress. Scoring in the five newer languages is a first version and will keep improving as native speakers lend their voices.

HOW A SCENE PLAYS The other person speaks first. Their words light up one by one as they are said, with a super-literal gloss under each word, so you always know which sound carries which meaning. Then you choose what YOU say — three replies, each taking the story somewhere else — and you say it out loud. Speak listens and rates your take.

STARS, NOT GRADES One to three stars. Three stars does not mean you sound Flemish — it means a Fleming would understand you without effort. That is the whole bar, and it is reachable from your first day. However a take goes, the story always moves on: a weak take is an offer to retry, never a wall.

THE FEEDBACK IS ON THE WORDS Green for the words that landed, a brick underline for the ones that need another go. Tap any word to hear it alone, slowly. And it lights up while you are still talking — a real acoustic model runs on your phone several times a second, not a transcript arriving after the fact.

IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGE English, Dutch, French or German. Every line'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. (In the five newer courses, translations are shown in English for now.)

DRAWN LIKE A BELGIAN COMIC Every beat of every story has its own picture in the klare lijn style Belgium gave the world — you play a scene the way you would read an album.

EVERYTHING RUNS ON YOUR IPHONE The speech 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 — takes are scored in memory 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.

PROGRESS IS EXPLORATION No streaks, no hearts, no daily guilt. A scenario's ring fills as you speak lines you had not spoken before, and its endings collect as you find them. Progress is how much of each story you have made yours.

FREE, AND NOT FREE-WITH-A-CATCH No ads. No subscription. No in-app purchases. Nothing is locked, and nothing interrupts play. Under the scenario library 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. If you are a native speaker of Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish or Russian, you can record a handful of prompt sentences from Hafsa's screen. 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 speech model and all twelve illustrated stories ship inside it — that is the price of never sending your voice anywhere.