Glisten

Listening Workouts for Language Learners

48 followers

Listening Workouts for Language Learners

48 followers

Glisten helps you become fluent in a language by listening to real native podcasts. The app achieves this by extracting the text of the podcast, and repeating each sentence in a Listening Workout. It even generates a transcript for you to read along.

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Launch tags:iOS•Languages•Apple

Launch Team

Viktor.comAn AI coworker that actually does the work

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Glisten

Maker

📌

I started to learn Spanish a few years ago. I already speak English natively, and Dutch fluently, but I wanted to see if I could learn a language without being immersed in it. (I live in The Netherlands.) I started like most people: I downloaded Duolingo and began learning words. I also joined a class, and continued for around a year. At some point I realized I had the basics of the vocabulary, and I could start reading short stories. This helped build up my cache of words even more, and understand grammatical tenses and structure. Surely I must be close to “knowing” how to speak Spanish now, right? I started to listen to real Spanish, and I was shocked to realize I was still years away. But what surprised me most was that when I listened to a native speaker, and was able to read a transcription of what was being said, I often already knew most of the words on the page! Why couldn’t I understand what they are saying if I already knew the words?! With more research, I discovered this is very common. It even has a name: the intermediate plateau. Flashcards and apps like Duolingo can only bring you so far. Once you reach the intermediate level, it is not enough to just keep learning words. You have to train your brain to hear the language, and you do that by listening — a lot. Next question was what to listen to? You can find podcasts for beginners, where they speak more simply and slowly. These are certainly worth listening to, but in the end, you have to move beyond this clear, slow speech to real native speakers, and that is a big jump. No matter how much I wanted to listen to real Spanish podcasts — because the content is often more interesting than podcasts for language learners — I could not follow it for very long. I would lose the context, and then it just sounded completely alien. I really wanted to listen to native speakers. If only I could find a way to do it, it would open up an almost infinite source of interesting content, and other aspects of my language learning, like speaking, would naturally improve in step. But if you can’t understand more than a sentence or two before getting lost, you’re all at sea, right? This is where my app maker’s brain started to come into play. Are there apps out there that can turn native spoken audio into something I can digest? Not really. A few barely maintained apps that didn’t really work well. Could I make such an app? I realized the technologies were already all there on Apple’s platforms. If I could recognize the text being spoken, and know where the words fall in the audio, I could playback sentences in creative ways: repeat them multiple times, slow them down, add pauses between sentences, and show the written text. All this to allow my brain to better process what is being said, learn the nuances, and maintain the context (which is 90% of understanding what someone is saying). That solves the playback, but what about content? Do I want to be the umpteenth creator of language learning content? Apart from the fact that I don’t have the skill to do this, I realized there was no need — there is already a mountain of content out there. But you have to make it easy for people to find it — like a podcast player. If you have a tool that can make spoken audio much more accessible, you can listen to just about anything, including podcasts. Podcasts are a perfect source of content. They exist for any topic that piques your interest; they are often free to listen to; and, Apple already provide tools for working with podcasts. At this point, it all started to come together: What if there were a podcast player focused on language learners, which could playback spoken audio in short repetitive chunks — a workout for your ears — with text extracted so you can read what is being said if needed as it repeats. “Glisten” was born.

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3yr ago

RescueTime

Looks great! I can't give much feedback since I don't use iOS but I do listen to a ton of podcasts for language learning. It's a great way to pick up new vocab and understand how people really speak in their native language (as opposed to something like Duolingo which I'm always wondering if the stuff they teach me is really applicable) Can't tell from the screenshots, but I hope there's a way to listen podcasts in a target language that are NOT related to language learning. For example, in Spanish, narrative podcasts like Caso 63 or current affairs podcasts. If I had an easy way to listen to stuff like that with a transcript and the features you're showing in the screenshots, it would be amazing.

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3yr ago

Glisten

Maker

@robby1066 Time to get an iPhone Robby! Just joking, of course. But, yes, Glisten is pretty standard in terms of browsing and following podcasts. Anything in Apple's podcast directory, in any language, can be followed, not just language learning podcasts. In fact, that was kinda the point of making the app: making it possible to listen to things normally above your level, by utilizing repetition of sentences etc. Note that the transcript will only generate for sentences in your target language, eg, Spanish if that is what you are learning. For other languages you get a "Could not recognize this bit" type of message.

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3yr ago

klemmbrett – early access

NICE! For me learning spanish was also a lot of audio and esp. audio books consumption to get used to the sound of it!

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3yr ago

Congrats on launch! Curious: does the app offer other languages besides Español?

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3yr ago

Glisten

Maker

@theevo Thanks! Yes, it launched with 5 languages you can learn: English, Spanish, German, Italian and French. Will be adding Portuguese and Dutch very soon, and many more to come.

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3yr ago

DataTable.dev

It looks great! Congrats on the launch 🚀

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3yr ago

MegaVote

Congrats Drew on your launch!

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3yr ago

Glisten

Maker

@maria_dt Thanks Maria!

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3yr ago

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