Reelang started because we kept looking for the same thing and never finding it: short-form videos from real native speakers that we could actually follow.
Not textbook dialogues. Not videos scripted for learners. Not AI-generated voices that sound like nobody. Just real people posting real things, somehow at a level that was within reach. That kind of content exists for every language. It’s just buried.
So we built the thing that digs it out.
Building Reelang in the open
We build Reelang for and with our learners. We share what we learn as we go, keep our roadmap public, and let you weigh in on what comes next.
Roman is an English teacher with 12 years of experience and a former IELTS speaking examiner. After thousands of hours with learners, he kept hearing the same complaint: people wanted to understand real spoken language, and what they had to work with was too hard, too fast, too boring, too artificial, or just wasn’t there. That’s what he brings to Reelang, especially the parts textbooks skip.
Roman grew up bilingual in Russian and English, picked up Mexican Spanish while living in CDMX, has been getting into Rioplatense Spanish, recently started learning German, and still has unfinished business with his college French.
Toby’s been a product manager and engineer for 16 years, building tools that make sense of messy human language: chatbots, then AI agents that understand tasks and browse the web. His take on AI: use it for the parts it’s good at (grading a video, picking the right one for you), and leave the rest to real native speakers (like sounding like one).
Toby is a German native speaker and has learned Dutch, English, Hungarian, Rioplatense Spanish, and some basic French.
The other thing we share: we’re both always curious about new places, new cultures, and the way people actually talk in them. A lot of Reelang comes from wanting to drop into a new language fast, using every tool we have to get there.
How the idea actually came about
Our first idea was simpler: a tool for language shadowing. Record a native speaker saying a sentence, repeat it, compare, fix your pronunciation, slowly pick up the natural rhythm. That’s still part of what we do. But while building it, we kept hitting a bigger problem we’d both quietly been living with: it’s hard to find content you can actually understand, especially early on in a language.
Once you’re further along, your feed starts mixing in the language on its own and you can coast. The hard part is the start, or jumping into a new language from zero. You either drill a vocab app that has you saying “the girl has a green apple” for months, or you try to watch real content and understand nothing.
For a few big languages, this is already solved beautifully. Toby’s a happy user of Dreaming Spanish and Dreaming French. Massive respect for what they do. But there’s nothing like that for Hungarian, or Dutch, or most smaller languages. And what does exist is often thin, repetitive, and stuck on colors and food. We thought: the material already exists. Real creators, posting every day. It just needs someone to find it, grade it, and line it up in the right order. So that’s what Reelang does.
What we believe
Real human speech is more fun to watch, and a better teacher, than AI slop. Full stop. The whole point of learning a language is to understand actual people: on the street, in cafés, in group chats. People who gesture too much, swallow half their syllables, and say the things no textbook prints.
Comprehensible input is the boring name for a simple thing: watching stuff you mostly understand, a little above your level. That’s how the understanding builds. It’s also how you pick up everything around the words: how people joke, complain, hype each other up. That’s what makes a language feel like yours instead of a subject you’re studying.
We use AI for the boring parts: scouring thousands of videos a day, grading their difficulty, picking what fits your level. The speech itself stays human. The creators stay the stars.
We’re early, and we’re all ears
We’re early. We’re adding languages, sharpening the grading, and making browsing feel less like a catalog and more like a friend showing you stuff. If you’ve got an idea, a request, a language you want us to add, or you just want to talk, we’d love to hear from you.
Email either of us at [email protected]. We read every message ourselves.
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