About
started because we kept looking for short-form videos from native speakers that we could actually follow, and kept not finding them.
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.
Co-founder · Linguistics, pedagogy & engineering
Roman grew up bilingual in Russian and English and has been working on his Spanish and German. He’s an English language tutor with many years of experience and used to be an IELTS examiner, so he’s spent a lot of time sitting across the table from people at every stage of the language learning journey, watching what helps and what doesn’t.
Co-founder · Product & engineering
Toby is a product manager with 16 years of experience, most of it around NLP and machine learning, and more recently LLMs, agentic browsing, and unstructured-to-structured data conversion. He’s excited about using AI to turn messy things like language into something with structure, and using AI for what it’s actually good at (like judging the level of a video) while not using it for what it’s not ready for yet (like generating speech that sounds like a real person on the street).
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 on the road a lot. Travel is where the itch to understand real speech gets loudest for us. Sitting at a café, catching snippets, wanting in. A lot of what makes it into Reelang is shaped by wanting to immerse ourselves in novelty and new cultures, and pulling every lever we’ve got to get there faster.
Our first idea was simpler: a tool for language shadowing. Record a native speaker saying a sentence, repeat it, compare, improve your pronunciation, slowly assimilate the natural rhythm. That’s still part of what we do. But as we were building it, we kept running into a bigger problem we’d quietly been dealing with ourselves: it’s hard to find content you can actually understand, especially when you’re not at the top of the curve yet in a given language.
Once you’re further along, your Instagram feed helpfully mixes in content in multiple languages and you can coast. But getting started, or jumping into a new one from zero, is the lonely part. You either end up drilling vocabulary apps that have 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 of the long tail. 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.
Real human speech is more fun to watch and a better teacher than AI-generated slop. Full stop. The ultimate point of learning a language is to understand actual people, on the street, in cafés, in group chats. People who gesture too much, swallow syllables, and say the things that aren’t in the textbook.
Comprehensible input, which is watching and listening to stuff you mostly get, a little bit above your current level, is how that understanding actually builds up. It’s also how you absorb all the cultural context that comes along for free: how people joke, complain, explain things, hype each other up. That’s the part that makes a language feel like yours instead of a subject you’re studying.
We use AI where it’s genuinely useful: scouring thousands of videos a day, grading difficulty, picking what’s a fit for your level. And we stay out of its way for the parts it still can’t do. The creators stay the stars.
We’re still in the early days of this. We’re adding languages, improving grading, making the browse experience feel less like a library and more like a friend showing you stuff. If you’ve got ideas, requests, a language you want supported, or you want to collaborate, we’d genuinely love to hear from you.
Email either of us at hello@reelang.com. We read every message ourselves.