You know that it works, but you still hate it. We made a few changes so you hate it less.
We have never pretended otherwise: this product is a serve machine set to pro speed, and most people who walk into the box walk straight back out. They hear one sentence of real native speech, feel the full weight of what they can't yet do, and leave. We used to shrug at that. The shrug was half right — the difficulty is the treatment, and softening the serve would be malpractice. But the other half was information we were too proud to read: the wall isn't the problem, the front door being a wall is.
So we built a farm system. In baseball you don't send anyone straight to the majors; there are leagues whose whole purpose is to feed the one that counts. The big club doesn't get gentler because the farm exists — it gets better prospects. Two new exercises, playable today, in that spirit:
A real human voice says a real sentence. You see the transcript with a single word blanked — the rarest one, not the easiest — and you type it. That's the whole game. It is significantly easier than full dictation, and that's the point: your ear still processes native speech at native speed, the spaced repetition still schedules your returns, but you're catching one ball instead of returning the serve. Call it cheap immersion. Cheap is not an insult; cheap means you can afford a lot of it, and volume is the destination.
Everything else here trains reception. This one demands production: you read an English sentence and write it in your target language, and a language model grades the meaning — not string distance against one blessed answer. Render the idea faithfully in a different construction and you get full credit, with an honest one-sentence verdict and a minimal correction of your attempt, so you learn from the direction you were already going. It's deliberately rationed — a small number of grades per day — because production graded carefully is expensive, for you and for us, and it should feel like it.
Cloze is cheap immersion. Dictation is the big passive basis. Translation is the fine-tuning. The farm feeds the majors; it doesn't replace them.
Full dictation remains the center of gravity — the unbluffable game, the one that builds the reflex. Nothing about it has been softened. If you can already stand in the box, stand in the box.
Both games are live right now on our staging surface — the workbench where we try things before they're official. That means: they may change under you, they may occasionally break, and your progress lives in your browser rather than your account. In exchange, you get them months before polish. Play cloze · try translation (English → Romanian first; more pairs as the corpora earn them).
If you tried this product once and left — this is the door we should have had when you visited. It works. You'll still hate it. Less.