Listen
Learn a language with your hands full
Press play and Taalhammer speaks your sentences aloud, in any of 76 languages, like a podcast made only of what you are trying to learn. No screen, no tapping. Your hands are busy on the commute, at the gym, on the run. Your ears are not.
What it actually is
Listening here is not a warm-up or a bonus tab. It is a full study mode you run with your phone in your pocket, and it plays two kinds of thing.
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Content
Courses and your own sentences, in one queue. The Core collections from A1 to C2 and anything else in the catalogue, plus every sentence you wrote yourself, all spoken aloud in any of 76 languages. A podcast plays you somebody else's sentences; this plays yours as well, which is the whole difference.
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Live radio
Stations broadcasting right now in the language you are learning, at full native speed, with nobody slowing down for you. Immersion rather than scheduled study. What Radio is and is not is further down.
The loop
Listening is the second half of something you already do. It works because of what comes before it.
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Practise the sentences you'll actually say this week
Write the sentence you need from your own life — the thing you failed to say at work, the phrase your in-laws use — or start from a ready-made collection. You rehearse your real conversations, not a textbook's.
Demo: learn and listen to your own contentRead: why learn ready-made sentences
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Know how every sentence sounds before you have to say it
Every sentence is spoken aloud, including the ones you typed yourself, in all 76 languages. Nothing sits silent waiting for you to guess, so the first time you say it out loud, you already know how it should sound.
Demo: listening practiceRead: why listen to your own sentences
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Fix your weak spots without planning a thing
The queue leads with what you keep getting wrong and with your own sentences, and weaves in short AI stories built from words you already know. You never decide what to review; the weakest material finds you.
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Learn to speak, not just to understand
You hear a sentence in one language, then a pause, then the other. Say it in the pause, then compare. That pause turns listening into speaking practice, which is the part a podcast cannot give you.
Demo: types of listening exercisesRead: shadowing and other exercises
What ends up in the queue
Listen plays the collections you have hearted as favourites, plus whatever repetitions are due today. Adding something is hearting a collection. Removing it is un-hearting the collection, or deleting the individual card in the Creator.
So the queue is not another thing to maintain. It is the same library, read aloud.
Your speed, not the recording’s
There is a tempo control on the player, from slow to faster than natural. Slow it down and you can shadow a sentence properly, syllable for syllable, until your mouth stops fighting it. Speed it up once the material is easy and you are just keeping it warm.
Slowed down, this is shadowing: you repeat each sentence straight after the voice, in the pause (or speak along with it, if you prefer). It is the exercise interpreters train on and the fastest way we know to fix an accent that has set. The same sentence at 70% and at 125% is doing two different jobs, and both of them are useful.
Why listening while moving is not a compromise
Light movement during learning is not a tax on it. In one study, people who walked while learning vocabulary retained more than people who sat still (Schmidt-Kassow, 2014), which is a strange result until you accept that the body is not separate from the memory. A calm replay before sleep helps overnight consolidation for much the same reason.
So the run is not the compromised version of studying. For a certain kind of material, it is the better one.
The research this is built on How the audio is actually made
What you get
76 languages
Every one of them with a real voice on every sentence, including the sentences you write yourself.
Courses from A1 to C2
The Core collections run one continuous path from absolute beginner to fluent, and you can listen to any of them.
Your own material, spoken
Anything you add gets audio and an automatic phonetic transcription, so it can go straight into the queue.
Learn and Listen together
The same library in two modes: on the screen when you have one, in your ears when you do not.
This is for you if
- You already listen to podcasts or audiobooks and would rather that time went into the language you are learning.
- You commute, train, run or cook, and the tap-the-screen apps never survive contact with any of it.
- You have a stack of sentences you keep failing to say out loud, and reading them again is not fixing it.
- You want to practise pronunciation properly, not just recognise words on a card.
What users say
Over 24,000 people forge a language with Taalhammer.
As a polyglot I tested all the other tools like Anki, Quizlet, and Memrise. But Taalhammer is in a league of its own. — Martin
Put something of your own into it, then go for a walk and listen to it.
Try it free