I learnt French at school and picked up a bit at the time, but I never got anywhere near the point where I could actually use it in real life. A long time later I tried learning again with apps like Duolingo and Memrise, but nothing really stuck for more than a couple of weeks. I made very little progress, gave up, and decided maybe I just wasn't built for learning a second language.
Then I came across the idea of comprehensible input. The idea is that you pick up a language mostly through listening to a lot of it, rather than drilling vocab and grammar rules. Specifically I found Dreaming Spanish, a site and YouTube channel where Pablo just talks about things in slow, clear Spanish with visuals. No exercises, no translation, just watching and listening.
A few weeks in, I started understanding words I hadn't looked up or known before. Seemed to be working, so I kept going.
Dreaming Spanish have their own platform where you can log your listening hours, which is what I was using. The problem was that a lot of my listening happened outside of it, mainly podcasts on the commute. At the end of the day I'd try to tot up how long I'd actually been at it so I could log it back in, and I'd inevitably be guessing.
What I wanted was something that just ran in the background while I listened, so I knew exactly what to log. I had a look around, couldn't find quite what I needed, so I built it.
PolyPod is a podcast player that tracks your listening time per language. You listen to podcasts (Spanish, Japanese, French, whatever) and it logs how long you've been at it. You can set a daily goal, keep a streak going, and see your total hours stack up over time.
There are no lessons. No quizzes. It just counts. The idea is that seeing the hours add up gives you something to hold onto when you can't otherwise tell if you're making progress.
I also added the things that make it decent as an actual player: speed controls, a sleep timer, and transcripts that scroll along as you listen, so it's not just a glorified counter.
Thanks to Dreaming Spanish
I wouldn't have made this without stumbling across Dreaming Spanish first. If you're learning Spanish and haven't tried comprehensible input, Dreaming Spanish is the place to start.
Just me. Software developer, based in the UK. I built this for myself and put it on the App Store in case anyone else found it useful. It's not backed by a company or a team of language experts. It's a side project that scratched my own itch.
If something's broken, confusing, or you've got a suggestion, drop me an email at support@polypod.app. I read everything.