For macOS 26 and later · Free for 7 daysLearn a language from the videos you love.
Bring any YouTube video, or your own videos and audio. Replay any line, have any word explained by your own ChatGPT, and keep what you learn.
Requires macOS 26 or later
One purchase. No subscription, no Tinyglot account.
Sample lesson
A sketch of a lesson in Tinyglot, with English captions shown alongside. Press play, or click an underlined word to select it. In the app, you can select any word or phrase.
Powered by your ChatGPT plan
The ChatGPT you already pay for, now a tutor for every video.
Continue with ChatGPT once. Explanations and Glee then run on the plan you already have: no API key to set up, no AI fee from Tinyglot, no second subscription.
Explain any word, as it’s used here
Select a word or phrase to see what it means in this sentence, how to read it, a grammar note when one helps and a fresh example, all in the language you know best. One click saves it for review.
Ask Glee, a tutor who knows the lesson
Ask why a line is said that way, untangle the grammar, or have Glee quiz you on the words you saved. Glee has read the whole transcript and takes you to the exact moment to replay.
- Sign in with your ChatGPT account. No API key.
- Uses your plan’s allowance. Tinyglot never charges for AI.
- Sent only when you ask, under your own account.
Needs an eligible ChatGPT plan. Watching, replaying and reviewing work without one.
GleeOrdering at a café
Why “me la llevo” and not just “la llevo”?
Here the verb is llevarse, to take something away with you, so me belongs to it: “I’ll take it.” La llevo alone would mean “I’m carrying it.”
0:10 · Vale, me la llevo.Quiz me on today’s words.
Sure! At the counter, how would you say “That’s four fifty”?
What you can watch
YouTube, or anything on your Mac.
You choose what to watch. Tinyglot shows you what’s said, line by line.
YouTube videos
Captions written by people or made by YouTube work right away, in every language the video has them.
Your own videos and audio
When YouTube doesn’t have what you want, use shows, films or classes saved on your Mac, in MP4, M4V or MOV. Subtitle files beside them (SRT, WebVTT or ASS) are found on their own. Podcasts, audiobooks and songs work too, in MP3, M4A, M4B, WAV, AIFF or FLAC.
No captions? Tinyglot writes them
For a video on your Mac, Tinyglot writes the whole transcript in moments: on our MacBook Pro, a 45-minute video took under a minute. For a YouTube video, it listens as the video plays, and each line appears a few seconds after it’s spoken. Both use the speech recognition built into macOS, so nothing is uploaded.
Remember
Words come back right before you’d forget them.
Every word you save keeps the sentence you met it in. Tinyglot schedules your reviews with FSRS, a modern spaced-repetition model that adapts to how well you remember each word.
- Recall the meaning, or the word missing from its sentence.
- Replay the moment in the original video.
- Space to reveal, 1–4 to rate, ⌘Z to undo a rating.
Why it’s built this way
Built around how I learn Chinese.
I’m Quang, and I built Tinyglot for myself. Learning Chinese, I found that what worked came down to two habits: listening to a great deal of Chinese I could mostly follow, and reviewing the words I met along the way just before I’d forget them. Tinyglot puts those two habits in one place.
A lot of listening
The linguist Stephen Krashen argued that we acquire a language by understanding messages in it, pitched just beyond what we already know.1 Forty years on, researchers still debate parts of his theory, but the central role of understandable input has held up.2 Words come this way too: learners pick up vocabulary simply from watching television in the language they’re learning,3 and captions help.4 So every lesson in Tinyglot is a real video you chose, with its captions as a transcript you can replay line by line.
Spaced review
A new word rarely sticks after one meeting; it takes many.5 Reviews spread out over time beat cramming,6 and trying to recall an answer does more than rereading it.7 So Tinyglot keeps every word you save with the sentence you met it in, asks you to recall it, and lets FSRS, a scheduler built on this research,8 decide when it comes back.
This is one way to learn, not the only one. Tinyglot isn’t a course: nobody writes lessons for you, and you’ll still want to speak with real people. But if you learn the way I do, by listening a lot and keeping what you hear, I hope it helps you as much as it helps me.
— Quang, who makes Tinyglot
Sources
- Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon.
- Lichtman, K., & VanPatten, B. (2021). Was Krashen right? Forty years later. Foreign Language Annals, 54(2), 283–305.
- Peters, E., & Webb, S. (2018). Incidental vocabulary acquisition through viewing L2 television and factors that affect learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3), 551–577.
- Montero Perez, M., Van Den Noortgate, W., & Desmet, P. (2013). Captioned video for L2 listening and vocabulary learning: A meta-analysis. System, 41(3), 720–739.
- Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
- Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968.
- Ye, J., Su, J., & Cao, Y. (2022). A stochastic shortest path algorithm for optimizing spaced repetition scheduling. Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 4381–4390.
Everything in one quiet place
Made for learning, made for the Mac.
Watch, understand, keep. Tinyglot stays out of the way so the language can come in.
Watch your way
Keep the video above the transcript, float it in Picture in Picture while you work, or hide it and just listen.
Hear it again
Replay the current line with a click, or loop it until you can make out every word.
All your languages
Learn several languages side by side, each with its own words, reviews and progress. Explanations come in the language you choose.
Help with Chinese and Japanese
Turn on tone-marked pinyin under Chinese lines. Explanations give readings such as pinyin or kana, and you can watch the stroke order of Chinese characters and kanji.
A gentle rhythm
A focus timer and a weekly intention, like 5 minutes, 4 days a week. A small session counts, and missed days leave your progress intact.
Yours to keep
Bookmark moments with your own notes. Export your words for Anki, a lesson as a Markdown note, and all your learning as a backup you can merge back in.
Private by design
Your learning stays on your Mac.
- No Tinyglot account, no analytics. Your words, bookmarks and progress are stored on your Mac.
- Nothing goes to OpenAI until you ask. Explaining sends what you selected, its line and the video’s title. Asking Glee also sends the lesson’s transcript.
- Credentials in the Keychain. Never in backups, never in logs.
Pricing
Try it for a week. Keep it for good.
Every feature is open during the free trial. No card, no sign-up.
Tinyglot for Mac
$5.99once
Launch price. It will rise as Tinyglot grows.
- Every feature, no subscription
- A license key by email, for 3 of your Macs
- Works offline once activated
Requires macOS 26 or later
Payments by Polar, with tax handled for you. Prices are in US dollars.
Questions
Does Tinyglot come with lessons?
No. Tinyglot isn’t a course and has no library of its own. You bring what you watch or listen to, and Tinyglot helps you understand it and keep the words you want.
What can I watch or listen to?
Any YouTube video. Tinyglot uses the video’s own captions, written by people or generated automatically, and when there are none in the language you want, it can transcribe the video as it plays.
Your own videos work in MP4, M4V or MOV, and audio in MP3, M4A, M4B, WAV, AIFF or FLAC. Tinyglot reads subtitle files beside them (SRT, WebVTT or ASS) and text subtitles inside the MP4, or transcribes the speech when there are none. Other formats, such as MKV, need converting first.
How good are the transcripts Tinyglot makes?
Clear speech comes out very well, with punctuation in most languages. Names, mumbling, music and voices talking over each other can come out wrong, so trust your ears when they disagree. Words Tinyglot isn’t sure of have a dotted underline.
Tinyglot uses the speech recognition built into macOS, so your video never leaves your Mac and ChatGPT isn’t needed. The first time you transcribe a language, macOS downloads its speech model from Apple. Which languages can be transcribed depends on your version of macOS. You can export any transcript as an SRT file.
Which languages can I learn?
28 languages, from English, Spanish, French and German to Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic and Hindi. You can learn several at once, and each keeps its own words, reviews and progress.
Do I need ChatGPT?
For explaining and saving words, and for Glee, yes: they use an eligible ChatGPT plan you connect in Settings. Watching lessons, replaying and looping lines, bookmarks, reviewing the words you’ve saved and the focus timer all work without it.
Tinyglot never charges for AI. What you use counts toward your ChatGPT plan.
What happens when the trial ends?
Tinyglot asks for a license key. Everything you’ve saved stays on your Mac, and you can still export a backup, with or without a key.
Can I move my license to a new Mac?
Yes. In Settings › License on the old Mac, click Deactivate This Mac, then enter your key on the new one.
Which languages is Tinyglot itself in?
English, Vietnamese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German and Brazilian Portuguese. Tinyglot follows your Mac’s language. To choose another just for Tinyglot, add it under Applications in System Settings › General › Language & Region.
A little curiosity. A new language.
Little by little, it clicks.
Requires macOS 26 or later