A weekly system for language learners
Italian poetry. K-drama without subtitles. Talking to your partner's family.
Tell us what you want to do in your target language. We send Week 1 within 24 hours — with weekly check-ins to keep it on track.
The Problem
They quit because they've spent six months figuring out:
Picking apps. Building Anki decks. Searching for tutors. Comparing methods that contradict each other. Every five hours of "studying" hides another five hours of planning the studying. It's a part-time job before you even start learning.
How it works
Not "be fluent" — the specific thing. Watch a K-drama. Talk to your in-laws. Read this novel. Follow this podcast. Two minutes of questions about your goal, your level, your real week.
A short, specific plan: what to study, what to listen to, what to read, how long each day. Built for your goal, your level, your actual week. With one concrete checkpoint at the end of seven days.
Two minutes. What you actually did, what clicked, what didn't, where you got stuck. Week 2 arrives recalibrated. "Last week you mentioned X — this week we're shifting to Y."
Same rhythm. By now we know your real pace, your real bottleneck, your real life. Week 3 is built around closing the gap to your week-21 win.
The specific thing you said you wanted to do, scoped to what's honestly achievable in three weeks. Then we plan the next cycle, with everything we now know about how you actually learn.
ChatGPT can write you a plan in 30 seconds. Running it for 21 days — knowing what to do today, whether it's working, when to adjust — is the part we do.
What we build every plan around
Most apps optimize for one of these. Most self-built plans miss at least two. We build around all three — because missing any one is usually why the last attempt stalled.
Every plan starts with the specific thing you want to do — read Calvino, follow a politics podcast, talk soccer with your partner's dad. We pull the high-frequency language for that context, not generic top-1000 word lists. No "finish Unit 8 to unlock Unit 9." The shortest honest path from where you are to the thing you came here for.
Most plans assume you'll find 90 fresh minutes a day. Yours doesn't. Your commute, your evening shows, your scrolling time — we turn what you already do into target-language exposure. The plan fits the week you live, not the one you'd live if you quit your job and moved to Lisbon.
Comprehensible input. Spaced repetition. Output practice. Frequency-weighted vocab. When to push, when to coast, when to switch methods. Serious learners spend their first year reading books and watching YouTubers to figure this out. We bring the meta-game — you do the language.
Sound right? Let's build your Week 1.
A thing most apps won't tell you
15 minutes every day beats 2 hours on Saturday.
Consistency dominates intensity over any timeframe that matters. We build plans for the time you'll actually do — not the time you wish you had.
What a real plan answers
Every serious learner eventually realizes they have to answer five questions, over and over again. We answer them for you — and re-answer them as you go.
Not "fluent." The specific, observable thing you want to be able to do — and the next concrete checkpoint on the way there.
Listening, reading, speaking, writing aren't one thing. Your goal decides which to prioritize — and in what order. A K-drama watcher and a job-interview learner need very different plans.
Not just how much time you have, but where it lives — your commute, your gym, your evenings, your scrolling. The plan fits the life you've got.
At your level, for your goal, with your time. This changes as you go — and so does the plan.
Plateau? Vocab depth? Listening speed? Pronunciation? Motivation? The plan evolves around fixing the thing that's actually blocking you — not the thing the curriculum thinks you should be doing this month.
Ready to stop managing it yourself?
A note from the team
Between us, we've tried to learn French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean. Years of being our own learning managers — comparing apps, hunting for the right podcast, switching between methods that contradicted each other, trying to guess whether we were making progress. We've quit, restarted, plateaued, restarted again.
What finally worked wasn't a better method. It was getting the management off our plate, pointing at a specific goal, and seeing real, observable progress every single week. We started building little personalized systems for ourselves and for friends. They worked better than anything we'd paid for.
Now we're building it for everyone else stuck in the meta-game. Right now we read every signup and hand-build every plan ourselves — because that's how we learn what to build. If you sign up, you get us. Not a chatbot, not a curriculum, not Unit 4 of 247.
— The Cadence founders
Two minutes of questions. Your first week's plan in 24 hours. We check in on Day 7, Day 14, and again at the end of the cycle. Revise as many times as you need.
Free during beta. Every plan and every weekly adjustment is currently built by hand by the founders. That's the point — this is how we learn what to build.