For macOS 26 · Free for 7 daysLearn a language from the videos you love.
Tinyglot turns YouTube videos with captions, and your own videos, into lessons. Replay any line, select a word to have it explained, and keep what you learn.
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.
What you can watch
YouTube with captions, or any video of your own.
Every lesson is built from what’s said in the video, so Tinyglot needs the words as text. Here’s where they come from.
YouTube videos with captions
Captions written by people or made by YouTube both work. Look for the CC button in the video’s player: without captions, a video still plays, but there’s nothing to read.
Your own videos
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.
No subtitles? Tinyglot writes them
Tinyglot listens to your video and writes the transcript, every line timed to the speech, with the speech recognition built into macOS. Nothing is uploaded. On our MacBook Pro, a 45-minute video took under a minute.
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.
Glee, a tutor that knows the lesson
Ask about a line, untangle the grammar, or let Glee quiz you. Glee reads the lesson’s transcript, points you to the exact moment, and uses your own ChatGPT plan.
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
Which videos work?
YouTube videos that have captions, whether written by people or generated automatically. Tinyglot builds the transcript from the video’s own captions, so a video without them plays but has no transcript.
Your own videos work in MP4, M4V or MOV. 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.
Why does macOS ask me to confirm before opening it?
Tinyglot is sold directly rather than through the App Store, so the first time you open it, macOS asks you to confirm in Privacy & Security. You do it once. See the steps.
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.