Why we start with your interests
The fastest way to abandon a language is to study words you will never use. Cookie-cutter curricula teach everyone the same fruits and family members in the same order, regardless of why you are learning. A month in, you can name a pencil case and still freeze when the thing you actually care about comes up.
We flipped the order. Tell TONGUES about your profession, your hobbies, the trip you are taking, even the slang you want — and the curriculum assembles itself around that. A nurse learns the ward; a traveler learns the night market; a DJ in Tokyo learns loading in and talking fee. The more specific you are, the more useful every session becomes. Usefulness is what keeps people coming back.
Interest is not a gimmick. It is retention.
People do not quit language apps because they lack discipline. They quit because the next card is boring. If the word will never leave your mouth, your brain files it as noise. If the word is the one you needed yesterday — 搬入, 半糖, ¿quieres bailar? — you will look for it again tomorrow.
That is why the homepage examples are not tourist phrasebooks. They are scenes: negotiating a set in Tokyo, ordering bubble tea in Taipei the way a local does, skating Barcelona all summer, salsa in Mexico. Same product, four different lives. TONGUES generates the vocabulary you will actually use, including the unpolished bits textbooks skip.
Start specific. Stay specific.
You do not have to wait until you are “ready” to study the language of your job or your trip. Starting with the words you need is how you get ready. Generic beginner lists have their place for the first few hundred items. After that, a shared curriculum is a compromise among millions of learners, which means it is optimized for no one.
When a deck is built around your terms, everything downstream gets better. Artifacts — stories, conversations, news — are generated from those same words, so the story is about the ward or the night market, not a fictional family buying apples. Audio playlists speak the cards you chose. FSRS reviews the ones you are about to lose. Interest is the input; memory is the output.
If you have ever closed an app because the next unit was “at the post office” and you were trying to learn for a kitchen, a clinic, or a club, that was the curriculum failing you. TONGUES starts where you actually are. Download it and tell it what you need.