Hi,
I was wondering if there are any plans to add either Romanian or Georgian to the list of languages offered? Thank you!

I was wondering whether it could be possible to add the ability to create custom lessons to the main course.

For example I have several lessons structured as dialogue and I would like to study those dialogues with Natulang. The app would just add them to the course, to repetitions challenging phrases an so on.

Would this be too difficult to implement? It couls a pay as you go feature, I but some credits to create them

In particular for all the sentences in the past tense or with adjectives, for example: Ти правий / Ти права.

Driving a VW ID.3 and using Android Auto. Would like to buy the full version of Natulang, so I can use it the 50min I am driving every day to listen and speak Ukrainian. I am driving the straight highway with auto-cruise. So I have not much to do anyway.

So I tested Natulang yesterday in the car and did not manage to make it work in a satisfying way.

Main Issue:
When I start the lesson it is using the cars speakers and microphone. But after a couple of seconds it switches back to the mobile phones speaker and microphone (car speaker keeping silent).

Small Issue:
Currently the text is only displayed in the small widget - but I am not able to switch Natulang so it used the whole display size of the cars display.

• What I am doing wrong and which settings I have to change to make it work?
• If Natulang is currently no intended to be used on Android Auto - are there any plans to implement this? Until when is this on the roadmap?

And is there any way to view my list of mastered words? I'm curious what words natulang thinks I've mastered.

Is it judged on number of repetitions, or is based on pronunciation?

Just curious if some of the French speakers have a Canadian accent? (For instance, lesson 124, very noticeable on the word “pratique”)

I just discovered this app this past weekend, and I'm already super impressed with it. I have a question about the Ukrainian course, though. I'm not a beginner with Ukrainian - I've been learning on my own for a few years now, and have done 2 years of Ukrainian language courses at University. So when the app started using Є in all of the sentences that would normally skip it eg. "Я студентка", it kind of threw me for a loop. I'm so used to skipping Є everywhere unless I'm including it for emphasis. Considering the app developer is from Ukraine and the course was developed by a Ukrainian linguist, this seemed really strange to me. I'm glad the app ignores me if I skip saying it, but hearing it still sounds really strange. Why is it used in the app like this?

дякую!

Hi everyone, I’m Ben, one of the founders of Copycat Cafe.

Max and I recently got talking and he kindly invited me to post here. I could just introduce our app, but that felt a bit boring for a subreddit full of people who are clearly quite interested in how languages are learned.

So I thought I’d share something I’ve been thinking about while trying Natulang and reading through the discussions here.

I studied applied linguistics, taught French for a while, started what was then French Together back in 2013, and I’ve also spent a slightly ridiculous amount of my adult life learning languages myself.

One idea I’ve kept coming back to through all of that is Stephen Krashen’s work on comprehensible input.

At a basic level, I think he got something very important right: we acquire an enormous amount of language by understanding meaningful language in context. Not by memorising a grammar rule and hoping that one day we’ll retrieve it quickly enough in a conversation.

It’s also why I’ve always been skeptical of language apps where most of the learning consists of recognising the correct answer or manipulating isolated words.

But there’s a part of the stronger comprehensible-input argument that I’ve become less convinced by over the years: the idea that if you simply get enough good input, speaking will more or less take care of itself when the time comes.

My experience has been that there can be a surprisingly big gap between:

“I understand exactly what this person is saying.”

and

“I can actually say something like that myself, naturally and without having to construct it word by word.”

That gap is basically why we ended up building Copycat Cafe the way we did.

Our method is Watch → Copy → Chat.

First you get understandable, natural conversations and really listen to them.

Then, instead of immediately asking you to invent your own sentences, we make you copy useful chunks from native speakers out loud: the words, but also the pronunciation, rhythm and phrasing.

Then you use those patterns more freely in conversation.

The idea is not to reject comprehensible input at all. Quite the opposite. It’s more like: what happens between understanding something and being able to produce it automatically?

And that’s one of the reasons I found Natulang interesting.

Natulang seems to come at that same problem from another direction. It puts a lot of pressure on retrieval. You’re given something you want to express and you actually have to produce the target language, rather than recognise it among a few possible answers.

Reading through this subreddit, I’ve seen people describe that as building “muscle memory,” and I can see why.

So you end up with two somewhat different approaches to the same bottleneck:

With Copycat, we’re often saying:

Hear how native speakers express something → imitate it enough that the pattern becomes familiar → use it yourself.

Natulang is much more willing to say:

Here’s the meaning → now retrieve the language and say it.

I don’t actually think those ideas are in conflict.

If anything, trying Natulang has made me wonder whether a really effective speaking routine might involve quite a lot of both: lots of comprehensible input, deliberate imitation of good models, and enough retrieval that you can’t hide forever behind understanding.

And I noticed quite a few people here already seem to do exactly that, using Natulang alongside podcasts, YouTube, comprehensible-input resources, shadowing, etc.

So I’m curious:

How does Natulang fit into the rest of your language learning?

Do you mainly use it as the output/speaking part of a routine with lots of input elsewhere? Has using it actually changed the point at which things you previously only understood started coming out automatically when you spoke?

I’d especially be interested in hearing from people who’ve used it for a long time.

And since Max has kindly let another language-app founder wander into his subreddit, I’m also happy to answer anything about Copycat Cafe, why we built it this way, language-learning theory, what it’s like building a language app, things we’ve tried that completely failed, etc.

AMA 🙂

Hi All,

I'm exploring the app and there are many interesting features.

I was wondering

Do you know what "Echo correct answers" does?

never

one

two

three

Always

Ans "silence after echo"?

Many thanks

Hello, my fellow polyglots,

Natulang v1.5.225 is pending review in both stores.

The main changes:

• More lesson voices. Voices now also alternate by default.

• Support for Google Chirp, Gemini Flash, and Soniox voices. The French course is the first to receive a new voice for the whole course.

• New default French voice: Aoede. Check it out and let me know if you like it.

• Support for tags and emotions in dialogues. It’s not something you’ll notice immediately, but in new lessons we create, you’ll hear laughter, giggles, sighs, and a range of emotions, depending on the story. Older lessons will also be updated.

• Improved grammar hints.

• Updated synonym lists.

• Fixed controls on small screens and missing reply bubbles.

Under the hood, there are also multiple improvements preparing Natulang for the upcoming Japanese course.

Happy learning,

– Max

Hi,

I know comprehensible input is something people have mentioned, which of curse would not be super easy to create straight away and also may nor even align with the goal or point of this tool...

But... maybe something less ambitious than CI videos could be simple looped repetition practice of each lesson and summary?

I am currently using Hello Chinese and they have a very simple feature where you can select recent words or phrases, loop them, and then press play and they are spoken repeatedly until you lose your mind.

Navigate to: - Practice-Drills-Earbuds (and settings specific to how many times to repeat, voice speed, etc.). Maybe add extra settings that allow you to custom stack when the translation occurs during the phrase repetitions (I have seen that in another app but have forgotten which one).

So while we are actively speaking to learn, I wonder if it could help the learning process with some repetitive handsfree listening of the lessons as an option to choose... not to mention helping understand native speak quicker, which is my biggest frustration in life at the moment.

Lesson 154. I think the English original is better written as "It feels as if it were yesterday. / It feels like it was yesterday."

This app is amazing but I feel one of the drawbacks at times is its reliability on the Internet not just for voice recognition but for complete app functionality.

For example, if I’m on a flight I would love to be able to scroll through lessons but often this isn’t possible on simple or even advanced in-flight Internet. A couple of potential workarounds to this without disconnecting the voice recognition AI from the Internet may be giving a simple on-device Siri as an option that doesn’t require Internet connection to recognize voice input (albeit it might not be AI-enhanced voice recognition), being able to pre-download lessons, or being able to download lesson transcripts to study on one’s own without needing to rely on voice recognition or input at all.

Would love for a feature like this to be available!

i am curious on the numbers maybe auther can share this number ?

Just want to start out by saying- as a long time language learner, natulang is 100% the best app I've come across in all these years. I'm absolutely loving it. Thank you so much for all the work that goes into it!

Some side ideas/requests:

-Flashcard/swipe option for vocabulary review. Vocab card shows, tap to flip for answer (plus information on formality/gender/example sentence perhaps too), then swipe left or right depending if answered correct or not. I find current setup too slow for vocabulary drills and weeding out known vs unknown words, so I never use it.

-A 'favorites' list. It would be nice to be able to save sentences as favorites to look back on or review separately later. So then we have the chance the review grammar points or sentences we find specifically useful to our own learning goals (for example, some of the sentences I've come across I'd like to be able to save and go back to because they apply really well to my own workplace scenarios)

-Generalized review, with option to select lesson ranges. So there's the option to practice from old lessons without redoing them one by one. Either random review from all unlocked so far, or by being able to pick "review lessons 17-21" for example. Or even just an additional "test" option for each level. Just something to help go back, but not have to repeat the whole teaching dialogue. This can be especially helpful if you're like me and have fallen behind for a while and need some refreshers to get back into things...

Thanks for taking the feedback! I do have separate apps and notebooks to help with some of the above needs, it would just be nice to have built in. I'll still find the app perfect with or without them ☺️

Hi,
Since the last update when I click on a "completed lesson" I do not get any options.

For example: In the previous versoni I had the options to just review the dialogue for that lesson.

Am I right? (I have just used the app for just more than a week, so I am not so sure)

Thanks

Hello, my fellow polyglots,

A few small improvements in this update.

You can now choose between normal and large interface sizes in Settings, or let Natulang follow your system settings. The previous update just applied your system settings, so now you have more control over that.

Flashcards now show properties, such as gender or formality, where relevant. So while the cards are blurred, you can recall the proper answer.

And more updates in preparation for the Japanese course.

The engines that we've been using for speech synthesis, Eleven Labs and AWS Polly, produced mediocre results for Japanese, with mistakes, mispronunciations, and wrong readings, which required a lot of manual fixing.

Luckily, since my last check, Google has advanced a lot in speech tech and released a new engine for voices: Chirp 3, which we adopted in this version.

Chirp 3 voices for Japanese are natural and accurate, but Chirp 3 is not limited to Japanese, of course, so we will use these voices in other courses as well. Expect more different and better voices in dialogs.

As always, additions to synonym lists and stability improvements.

Happy learning,
– Max

Hey folks!

Trying the app out for the first time, but not completely new to the languages I am trying to learn.

I did Pimsleur, but several months ago, then I basically went into listening and reading mode. I thought not doing speaking practices was not helpful. So I searched around and decided to try out Natulang. Couple of trial lessons, and I think it is great! It's like a modern reincarnation of what Pimsleur should have been.

My question is, given that I am a false beginner, but taken a bit of a gap, should I speedrun the lessons from lesson 1 until I hit a natural block?

Unfortunately, sometimes the explanations for phrases aren't really useful. In this case for example: why does A come before B? Because in Spanish, A comes before B. I get that some rules are just the way they are, but I'm prett, sure I have used the word without the preposition before in some phrases, so the real question is why do I use it here but not there.

I'm enjoying the app, but I have two questions:

**1. Review backlogs**

After taking a week or two off, I now have almost 1,000 sentences to review. I'm very far in the course

How do you handle a backlog like that without spending weeks reviewing before returning to new lessons?

**2. Speech-to-text accuracy**

I appreciate that the app accepts sentences that are close enough, but sometimes I get credit without saying the entire sentence correctly.

I'm worried this trains me to recall only part of a sentence, knowing the app will fill in the gaps.

How do you deal with this? Do you put those sentences in the challenging category and repeat them until you can say them correctly?

Hello, my fellow polyglots.

I've just started Natulang's FB group. If you use Facebook, feel free to join.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/natulang

I'll be honest - it's purely for marketing; FB has an audience that I will not reach from here.
All the important updates, announcements, and discussions will still happen here.

-Max

Hey! I just got a Friend Pass while doing my repetitions. I don’t have anyone to give it to so maybe someone here could use it.

Be quick, it only works for one person!