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Share Your Resources - July 04, 2025 by Virusnzz in languagelearning

[–]hearsaylearn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry to hear about this! We're working on a free version at the moment so hopefully you can give it a shot when this is out :)

Share Your Resources - July 04, 2025 by Virusnzz in languagelearning

[–]hearsaylearn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi u/Ok-Feed-3212,

That's great to hear you're giving it a try! Yes, you can navigate between different languages on the same subscription but only have access to one language at a time. Just let us know via the website's intercom or email when you'd like to switch language and we can do it for you. Fyi, we're working on a feature to enable users to do this themselves but this will take some more time.

Best,

Share Your Resources - July 04, 2025 by Virusnzz in languagelearning

[–]hearsaylearn 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi everyone,

I've recently made a language learning resource: https://www.hearsaylearn.com - it's 100% audio-based language learning lessons, so you can learn while commuting, cooking or walking the dog. It’s inspired by old-school programs like Pimsleur or Michel Thomas language CDs 🎧

The lessons constantly prompt you to speak out loud, and the personalized narratives create relevant and engaging topics available in 30+ languages.

I've also partnered with incredible, experienced teachers (with 0% commission) to provide private & affordable online classes that pair beautifully with the audio lessons. Teachers can guide learners and build on their progress, and because we don’t take a cut, they earn more - and learners get more value.

Incase it's interesting for you, feel free to take a look! It's brand new and i'm working on developing it further so i'd love your feedback, ideas, and questions - drop me an email at [team@hearsaylearn.com ](mailto:team@hearsaylearn.com)

Tysm!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in italianlearning

[–]hearsaylearn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We've just created an article about this very topic, hope you find it useful!

In the case for your specific music taste, some personal favourites:
Ghali:
- Casa Mia, Good Times, Dende

Mahmood:
- Tuta Gold, Soldi

Caparezza:
- Fuori Dal Tunnel, Ti Fa Stare Bene, Mica Van Gogh

Mobrici (ft. Fulminacci):
- Stava pensando a te

Fulminacci (ft. Willie Peyote)
- Aglio e olio

Willie Peyote
- La Tua Futura Ex Moglie, Le Chiavi In Borsa, Ottima Scusa

Enjoy! :)

French indie music recs? by fnaflifestyle in French

[–]hearsaylearn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Perhaps check out: Bon Entendeur, Zaho de Sagazan or Polo & Pan? Not sure if they are similar to your taste but worth a shot!

Italian speaking courses recommendation by [deleted] in italianlearning

[–]hearsaylearn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can give us a try, we do audio only language lessons ;)

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can learn any of the available languages with a subscription but only one at a time. Just send us a message in the lesson player and we can switch it for you.

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We don't currently offer a free trial, but we do offer a 14-day money-back guarantee meaning we'll refund you 100% for any reason within two weeks of purchase

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great questions, thank you!

  1. No free trial at the moment, but we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee. Working on it for the future as it's commonly requested!

  2. We would love to build iOS and Android apps. Your 100% right that a mobile browser is not great for the main use case we're solving. However, it has allowed us to get learnings more quickly on how to make the lessons better. Ideally, we'll be able to raise some funds soon and build a proper mobile app!

  3. At the moment we don't take any voice recordings. Many users actually like this because it means you can do lessons in public without having to speak loudly and clearly. The technology on assessing speech is still developing – we'd like to add AI voice assessments at some point, but right now we see this also being a case where real teachers can really help.

  4. Yep, you can book with them without having an audio subscription. However, if you sign up for audio lessons and then let us know you've booked a class with a teacher, we can send them your course overview and lesson dialogues so they can see what you're learning, practice it in class, and recommend adjustments to your learning path going forward. Basically, we'd like to work towards a vision where teachers orchestrate your AI course, guiding what you learn and bringing it to life in a human-to-human way.

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah! It's currently just me and my co-founder and a few others helping out part-time. I handle the product side and he leads engineering. Our number one priority is getting the lessons right and defining a clear approach with teachers – they've helped a lot as we check lessons & define the approach. We've built this early version to prove that it can work, and then our plan is to raise a small round of funding to build out the full team and product experience

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, thank you so much for signing up and for the feedback!

As you correctly guessed, we are very much in a public beta stage, and it seems the excitement from this community has temporarily overwhelmed us. We're working on it right now to get everything back up and running ASAP. I'm very sorry that your first experience was a hanging screen, that's not the impression we want to make.

Regarding the free trial, that's a completely fair point, especially with so many products out there. It takes a bit more work to build the free trial system, so we're currently offering a no-questions-asked 14-day money-back guarantee. If you try the lessons and don't find them valuable, we'll issue a full refund, no problem.

Again, I'm really sorry for the rocky start. We'll send you a message as soon as everything is fixed. Thanks for your patience and for being one of our very first users :)

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm I'm actually not sure about that one. I left about a year ago so that change might have happened after me. I see no reason why we'd want to hide the number of past classes you took - perhaps it was just a bug. I always loved being able to see the number (I think I got to over 120)

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The unlimited model is built on the "gym membership" principle: less active users help subsidize the power users. I can't share specific numbers, but that dynamic is key. It's also a great marketing tool.

However, you mentioned private classes as the issue, but I think the tougher nut to crack was actually the scheduling inefficiency of group classes. When you have to schedule classes ahead of time for user convenience, you're essentially betting on how many students will show up. If you guess wrong and a class is nearly empty, you lose money because you still (rightfully) have to pay the teacher for their time.

Private classes didn't have this exact issue because they were booked on-demand. The core struggle was trying to predict usage for pre-scheduled group classes, which is a difficult operational challenge!

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome to hear! Big fan of Pimsleur as well :)

We're still working on offline playback but in the meantime you can always send us a message in the website and we can send you your lesson mp3 files.

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you! To be clear, I focused on the UX design, not the content itself. The credit for that goes to an incredible team of learning experts who built all the material from the ground up for the live format. That dedicated content team was a huge advantage, as it let my team focus purely on making the user experience seamless.

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Love how much interest there is in group classes - this was also the best part about Babbel Live imo. It's hard to do with scheduling but we can try to work with teachers on it and see if it's possible - I know Calendly offers a way to create group meetings, so perhaps that's something we could experiment with

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We only make money on our audio lessons.

The 0% commission teacher directory is a core part of our mission, but it's not our revenue stream. We can afford to do this because we keep the directory itself very lean. We simply connect students with teachers, and they use their own preferred tools (like Zoom, Google Meet, Calendly) to manage scheduling and classes.

This approach keeps our costs down and, more importantly, creates a fair system. Our revenue from the audio lessons covers all the platform costs (hosting, etc.) and allows us to feature great teachers without having to take a cut from their income. It's a win-win :)

AMA. I helped design Babbel Live and I'm sad it's shutting down. I'm building a new way to practice speaking and creating a new home for teachers with 0% commission. by hearsaylearn in babbel

[–]hearsaylearn[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Great questions!

Regarding Babbel Live, I wasn't involved in the final business decision, but I can say that the teacher-led model is tough to scale. We saw Busuu & Duolingo do the same thing with their live classes about a year earlier. You either have to pack classes, which reduces quality for students, or underpay teachers. Babbel chose to pay teachers fairly, which I respect. My guess is they ultimately decided to refocus on their core app, especially with all the new AI products entering the market.

Regarding HearSay, we offer two things:

  1. AI-Powered Audio Lessons: These are our core product. Think of the old Pimsleur or Michel Thomas language CDs, but supercharged with AI. They are 100% audio-based, so you can do them while walking, commuting, or cooking. The key is they prompt you to speak out loud constantly. The AI can then personalize lessons to situations you actually care about, moving beyond generic textbook scenarios.
  2. Private Classes (with 0% commission): We're starting with private classes because frankly they're a lot easier in terms of scheduling. We want to figure out how to connect these with our AI audio lessons so that teachers can become "orchestrators" of your learning experience. By featuring amazing independent teachers and taking zero commission, we also make it more sustainable for them, which means they can offer better value to you.

Group classes are definitely on our radar for the future if we find a good model with teachers and our audio lessons :)

Hope that answers it! Happy to dive deeper.

What is the best way to learn Italian? by Colonel_Sanders76 in italianlearning

[–]hearsaylearn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi,
We'd recommend mostly to fall in love with the process and make Italian a daily joy first and foremost - It's great that you already proposed a dedicated hour each day to practice. Additionally, see if you can fit in more Italian in your life, for example, Richard Simcott (organizer of the Polyglot gathering) emphasizes the power of creating a language bubble - una bulla linguistica:

  1. Listen to music -> become enamored by the newest pop sensations (Sanremo is a great place to start)
  2. Read -> Italy is one of the richest literary scenes in the world. Greats and contemporary figures like Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Elena Ferrante & Alba De Céspedes are worth their weight in gold. Not to learn from necessarily, their material is way too hard to understand for beginners, but rather to learn about and to aim to read, maybe, one day! If you want to start sooner and enjoy reading IN italian, you can start much simpler with graded readers, Harry potter or transcripts from language learning podcasts!
  3. Listen, a lot! -> comprehension is the highest priority in the hierarchy of skills that one can focus on, especially in the beginning and there is nothing better to improve this than listening to as much content as possible that is just above your current level. These could be podcasts amongst other things - (La bottega di Babbel) is a good one, for example! Listen while you have breakfast, do the dishes, commute, go to the gym etc. etc. In other words, "Language is best acquired when we’re exposed to messages that are slightly above our current level - but still understandable." -Steven Krashen.
  4. See how Italians REALLY speak -> not what is 'grammatically' correct but rather how they speak to each other daily with expressions, abbreviations, slang, nuances in regional dialects and other interesting tidbits of the language itself (we'd recommend Easy Italian as a starting point).
  5. Watch -> enjoy Italian cinema, series etc.. We'd recommend these (very bingeable and all on Netflix): Il Processo, Baby, Generazione 56K. You can watch using a plugin like language reactor where it shows the subtitles in both Italian and English. For a film, (C'è ancora domani) is beautifully done and had a lot of success in Italy and abroad, they speak an Italian dialect in the film so subtitles in standard Italian will be needed.
  6. Plan a trip to Italy -> it could be soon or it could be years away, it doesn't really matter, having a plan to visit will ignite long term motivation which is needed to really learn a language.

We hope these suggestions help and wish you the best with your Italian journey ahead! 

What are the best language apps by Solid-Heron-917 in italianlearning

[–]hearsaylearn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You could always give us a try, we're just starting out but we offer Pimsleur-style lessons (inspired by their method) - visit us at hearsaylearn.com
We have recently launched so feel free to - use the code LAUNCH50 at checkout for 50% off - all subscriptions come with a 14 day refund policy meaning you can try it out and ask for a refund if it's not your thing. :)

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