Talk is a language-learning game built around the two skills textbooks neglect most: listening and speaking. The aim is to make daily speaking practice feel like play rather than study.
The Challenge
Most language apps drill reading and vocabulary because they are easy to grade automatically. Listening and speaking are far harder to make fun and to evaluate, yet they are exactly the skills learners struggle to practice alone without feeling self-conscious.
The Approach
I framed practice as a game loop where the player listens, responds out loud and gets immediate feedback, so progress feels like winning rather than revising. Audio assets are streamed efficiently so sessions stay responsive, and the experience is designed to be picked up for a few minutes at a time.
Tech Choices
SvelteKit and TypeScript provide a reactive front end that can react to speech and audio in real time. Cloudflare Workers serve the app at the edge, and Cloudflare R2 stores the audio assets cheaply and delivers them quickly to learners anywhere.
What I Learned
Designing for speaking taught me that motivation, not content, is the real bottleneck in language learning. Storing and streaming audio at the edge with R2 highlighted how much perceived quality depends on latency, and how a game frame can lower the embarrassment that stops people practicing.