Our story

We are a family with two parents, two boys and two languages in one house. One of us grew up speaking German. The other is learning it, slowly, mostly at bedtime, and usually a sentence behind the older boy.

This started on an ordinary evening. One of us asked a question in German and got the answer back in English, without a pause, as if the question had been in English all along. We both laughed. Then we both stopped laughing, because we had been watching it happen for weeks and telling ourselves it was nothing.

It was not nothing. German in our house came out of one grown-up, usually in a hurry, and often when somebody was in trouble. A child works that out quickly. A language that belongs to one grown-up, and turns up mostly as a correction, is a language a child will quietly put down.

The obvious repair was for the rest of us to learn it too. That turned out to be the hard part. The apps we tried sat the child alone in front of a cartoon, or sat the grown-up alone in front of a lesson at eleven at night. Neither of those is a family doing something together, and neither of them lasted a week in our house.

So we built the ten minutes we kept wishing for, and we call it a Huddle. After dinner, one phone, passed back and forth. It opens with a phrase from last time and the child deciding whether the parent has it yet — the child is the judge, and in our kitchen it is the part nobody wants to skip. Then a few new cards for tonight, each one spoken by a native voice, each one handed over. Then the phone goes face down and there is one question to talk about at the table, for as long as the table lasts.

What a Huddle is not is a test. Nothing is scored. Nothing is timed against a child. The phrases are chosen and checked by people rather than written fresh every night, because a sentence you are going to say to your own child should have been read first by an adult who speaks the language. And the parent is a learner in the session, out loud, getting it wrong in front of the child. That is not a side effect. It is the whole idea.

Then there are the grandparents. They live in Germany, and for a long time the video calls went the way those calls go: a wave, a toy held up to the camera, an adult translating in the middle. Something changes when the child has words of their own to spend. The call stops being a performance for the grandparents and starts being a conversation with them. That is the thing we are actually building for.

About money, plainly, because we hate finding it in the footer. There will be one plan for the whole family, and the yearly price is the one we show first, because it is the honest one. Before any of that there is a full trial — all of it, not a sample. And your progress and your own phrases stay yours if you ever stop paying — still there, still readable. We are not going to hold your family's own sentences hostage.

We started with German and English because that is our house, and because we would rather do one pair properly than six badly. The app is built so that the next pair is data, not a rewrite: the phrases, the recordings and the topics live outside the code. We will add languages as families ask for them.

We are not a language school, and there is no method here to sell you. There is a phone on a kitchen table at seven o'clock, and two people trying to make the smaller language belong to all four of us.