Introducing Story Mode: move to a new town and live in your new language
ConvoLive now opens in a small town. You've just moved there, every conversation is a place you walk to, and the 20 people you meet remember what you tell them.
Blog
Notes on learning to speak a language: what works, what wastes your time, and how to get talking sooner.
The 12 phrases to learn before any trip, in any language
Eight phrases get things done on a trip and four keep you in the conversation once it starts, verified for tone in nine languages so you sound like a person, not a pointing tourist.
What to say when you don't understand, in nine languages
The phrases that keep a conversation alive when you've lost the thread, verified for tone in Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian, German, Mandarin, Portuguese, Korean and English.
ConvoLive 1.2: we rebuilt the app around speaking
The biggest update we've ever shipped. Lessons are now conversations, you talk from the first minute, and everything else in the app exists to get you through the next thing you want to say.
You don't have to quit Duolingo
Keep your streak, your Anki deck, your Tuesday class. Whatever you're using to learn a language, the part it's almost certainly missing is spoken conversation, and that part fits alongside everything else.
Nothing made me fluent until I couldn't ask where the bathroom was
Study abroad works for a reason that has nothing to do with immersion. It's also why a two year streak won't make you fluent. Why I built a language app that makes you speak first.
Why you can read a language but can't speak it
You know the words. You've done the hours. Then someone asks you a question and nothing comes out. The gap isn't vocabulary, it's retrieval under a clock, and it closes in a way studying never will.
How to practice speaking a language when you have no one to talk to
You do not need a partner, a tutor or a trip abroad to get speaking practice. Six ways to train your mouth on your own, ranked by how much they actually help.
What's New in ConvoLive: Your Language Learning Journey Just Got a Whole Lot Better
Custom scenarios, leaderboards, smart conversation suggestions, word highlighting and a rebuilt speech engine — everything that shipped this month.