Carpincho
Don't be a tourist.
Enough to order dinner, joke with family, and never get switched to English.
Speak and listen, graded honestly
You start at a café where you greet, sit down, order, ask the waiter something and pay. Then a kiosk, a market, a bus stop, a pharmacy, the phone call you've been putting off. Each place is one thing you can do afterwards, and you leave it before it gets long. No levels, no streaks, no percentage bars.
Seventy-one of the sentences in Carpincho are the ones coming at you, not the ones you say. ¿Para acá o para llevar? ¿Se lo caliento?Most apps teach you to speak. Almost none teach you to understand the answer, which is where the conversation actually breaks. Eighteen more are for the second you didn't catch it. ¿Cómo? ¿Me lo repetís?That's the second where someone switches to English, or doesn't.
Record a sentence and you get one of three answers: understood, borderline, or not yet. Plus the two or three words that were weakest. A number tells you nothing. Non-native speakers land at 68 out of 100 all the time and are perfectly understandable. What you need to know is whether the person across from you would have got it.
Three Spanishes, all equal
You'll sound like you're from where you are.
Argentina and Uruguay, Latin America in general, or Spain. Every word and every sentence is spoken in all three, by three different voices, even when the text is identical. Gracias sounds different in Buenos Aires than in Madrid, and you can hear it. La palta or el aguacate. Vos podés or tú puedes. You pick, and you can switch any time.
The blurred block
You'll stop hearing one long word.
On its own you know para dónde vas. In real speech it arrives as padóndevas, one block your brain can't cut apart. That's not a vocabulary problem and more words won't fix it. Dictation at three speeds does. Listen, type what you hear, see which words went missing. It's always the same small ones, for everybody, which is oddly reassuring.
Nothing to keep up
Miss a week and nothing happens.
No streaks to break. No hearts to lose. No notification asking where you've been. Two deliveries a day if you want them: a word in the morning, a sentence in the evening, both off until you turn them on. The only number Carpincho shows you is an honest one: how many words you can actually say out loud.
Start in thirty seconds
No account. Nothing to sign up for.
Open the app and the first place is right there. Your progress lives on your phone. An account exists if you want it on a second device, and that's the only reason it exists.
Get the app →