The Glisten Origin Story

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 get a hold of a transcription of what was being said, I often already knew most of the words on the page! I couldn’t grasp why I couldn't 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 for me 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 generally 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.

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 the user to browse and find it, like a podcast player does!

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, including daily news;  they are often free to listen to; and, Apple already provide tools to developers for accessing and 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.