melune a spoken-language tutor for macOS
In development
in prelaunch
v0.4 · alpha

a patient tutor for spoken language.

melune is a desktop app for adults who want to actually speak the language they're learning. You sit down for a real conversation in your target language, then afterwards you read careful notes on what you said — what was right, what wasn't, and what to try the next time.

Built by a psycholinguist, grounded in second-language acquisition research rather than gamification. Small daily conversations, targeted feedback, spaced review, and a slow, honest measure of progress.

a note · May 2026
melune is in early development and not yet available for download. It's being built in the open as a native macOS app, currently in internal alpha. This page is a quiet placeholder for now — a record of what works today, what's coming next, and the thinking behind it.
about

What melune is.

The unit of practice is a conversation. You sit down for fifteen minutes, speak with the tutor in your target language, and end the session. The tutor listens patiently, asks follow-ups, and remembers what you've said in previous sessions — your job, your family, the trip you took last month, the show you're watching.

Afterwards, a written replay opens. Each of your turns has any grammatical corrections attached inline, with a short explanation of why. Pronunciation notes use IPA and sit alongside the audio you actually produced. New vocabulary the tutor used gets queued for review later.

Over time, melune builds a picture of where you tend to slip — which case you keep getting wrong, which vowel you keep collapsing — and the next day's session is shaped around that. The recommendation comes with its reasoning visible: which categories it's targeting and why it picked them.

approach

Three things I care about.

These shape almost every design decision in the app. They're more useful than a feature list because they explain what gets left out, too.

i.
Conversation first

Spoken practice is the central activity. Drills, vocabulary, and reading exist to support what you do when you're actually talking.

ii.
Transparent feedback

Corrections explain themselves. Your proficiency estimate shows its confidence. The curriculum tells you what it's working on and why.

iii.
Quiet, reading-shaped UI

Long-form feedback is treated like prose, not chat. The interface gets out of the way of the words.

where it is

What's working today.

Honest snapshot of where the build is. Items marked working are wired end-to-end in internal alpha; in progress means the engine is done but the UI is being rebuilt; planned means designed but not yet started.

  • ● Working
    Live voice conversation Real-time spoken dialogue with the tutor in your target language. Per-turn audio captured for replay, pause and resume the mic without ending the session.
  • ● Working
    Written session replay After each session, a typeset transcript opens with grammatical corrections, phoneme-level pronunciation notes, and a short summary of themes and highlights.
  • ● Working
    Adaptive placement test A three-phase test (written items, spoken items, free conversation) that adjusts difficulty as it goes. Produces a proficiency estimate with a confidence band and a per-category map of weak spots.
  • ● Working
    Adaptive curriculum "Today's session" is computed from your current weakness profile. Each plan shows its targets, an i+1 stretch goal, and the reasoning behind the choice.
  • ● Working
    Per-language memory The tutor maintains a running, editable understanding of who you are and uses it to personalize sessions. You can see exactly what's stored about you and remove or edit anything.
  • ◐ In progress
    Vocabulary deck Cards auto-populated from real tutor turns, with an "I knew this" bulk action for the unconfirmed queue and an FSRS-based review loop. Card editor is being redesigned.
  • ◐ In progress
    Drill mode Short, focused practice — five to ten items in a row, each targeting one specific grammar or pronunciation feature. Engine is finished; the interface is being rebuilt around the new replay components.
  • ○ Planned
    Listening modes Comprehensible-input monologues at your level, sentence-by-sentence shadowing with pronunciation feedback, and a paste-any-text reader with tap-for-translation.
  • ○ Planned
    More languages The data model and analysis prompts are already language-agnostic. German and Korean are the current tracks; Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish are next.
  • ○ Planned
    iOS companion Read-only at first — browse past replays, review the deck, listen to comprehensible input on the go. Live conversation stays on the desktop until it can be done properly on a phone.
practicalities

A few things worth knowing.

macOS first. melune is built natively in SwiftUI for the desktop. Sessions happen at a real keyboard with real audio hardware, which is where careful practice tends to happen anyway. An iOS companion will follow.

Subscription, not BYO API key. Even the earliest public builds will be a paid subscription rather than asking you to wire up your own model provider. The price is not finalized; I'll publish it when the first build is ready.

Two languages at the start. German and Korean are the initial target languages — chosen because they exercise different parts of the architecture (case morphology in one, speech levels and an honorific system in the other). More languages come once those two feel right.

A small, careful release. The first public build will go out to a small group, not a wide launch. There will be a way to put your name down before that happens — it's not wired up yet.