German (Deutsch)
Polygloat is a comprehensible input app for German. You watch short videos in German, hold any word in the subtitles to see what it means in that sentence, and the app keeps track of the words you have met so it can pick videos you are ready for.
There is no deck to review and no grammar drill. The learning happens while you are watching something you can follow.
German is famous for its grammar, but what slows most learners down in real speech is vocabulary in disguise. A verb splits in two and sends its second half to the end of the sentence: in “Ich rufe dich morgen an”, the verb is anrufen. Nouns change their vowels in the plural, and endings shift with case and gender.
That is what makes German made for native speakers so hard to follow early on, and why a word list alone does not prepare you for it. You need to meet the words in real sentences, often, with the disguise explained the moment you get stuck.
Comprehensible input is the middle ground: German you can follow most of, with the unknown words close enough together that you pick them up from context. Polygloat's job is to find that material for you, video by video, instead of leaving you to guess whether something is at your level.
Subtitles are word-by-word, timed to the audio. Hold a word and you see what it means in this sentence — not a dictionary entry listing every possible sense. The full dictionary entry is there too, when you want it.
If a whole line goes past you, hold the translate icon and the sentence appears translated. The point is to stay in the video rather than open a translation app and lose the thread.
The app records which words you looked up and which you watched past. That word-by-word picture of your vocabulary is what it uses to pick what you see next.
A word you are due to see again comes back in a different sentence from a different speaker, days later — the spacing of a review schedule without a deck to work through. The subtitles colour each word by where it stands: new, learning or due for review.
Set a daily goal of a few minutes for each language and keep a streak going. Rest days mean one missed day does not have to end it.
Split verbs, conjugations and plurals link to the word they belong to: rufe … an leads to anrufen, ging to gehen, Häuser to Haus. You learn the word once instead of collecting its forms one at a time.
Yes. The app starts from the most common words in German and works up. You do not need to have studied German before — you hold the words you do not know, and the feed adjusts to what you have picked up.
No, and it does not pretend to. There are no grammar explanations and no case tables. What it gives you is a lot of German you can understand, with every word form tied back to its dictionary word, which is what makes the grammar you study elsewhere recognisable in real speech.
English, Spanish, Dutch, Ukrainian and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional). Word meanings and sentence translations both come in those languages, and the app itself is available in 18 languages.
Polygloat is not an exam course and does not teach to a syllabus. What it builds is listening comprehension and vocabulary from real speech, which is the foundation exams test. Use it alongside exam preparation, not instead of it.
Polygloat is free to download and use on the App Store and Google Play.
