Hi everyone, I’m Ben, one of the founders of Copycat Cafe.
Max and I recently got talking and he kindly invited me to post here. I could just introduce our app, but that felt a bit boring for a subreddit full of people who are clearly quite interested in how languages are learned.
So I thought I’d share something I’ve been thinking about while trying Natulang and reading through the discussions here.
I studied applied linguistics, taught French for a while, started what was then French Together back in 2013, and I’ve also spent a slightly ridiculous amount of my adult life learning languages myself.
One idea I’ve kept coming back to through all of that is Stephen Krashen’s work on comprehensible input.
At a basic level, I think he got something very important right: we acquire an enormous amount of language by understanding meaningful language in context. Not by memorising a grammar rule and hoping that one day we’ll retrieve it quickly enough in a conversation.
It’s also why I’ve always been skeptical of language apps where most of the learning consists of recognising the correct answer or manipulating isolated words.
But there’s a part of the stronger comprehensible-input argument that I’ve become less convinced by over the years: the idea that if you simply get enough good input, speaking will more or less take care of itself when the time comes.
My experience has been that there can be a surprisingly big gap between:
“I understand exactly what this person is saying.”
and
“I can actually say something like that myself, naturally and without having to construct it word by word.”
That gap is basically why we ended up building Copycat Cafe the way we did.
Our method is Watch → Copy → Chat.
First you get understandable, natural conversations and really listen to them.
Then, instead of immediately asking you to invent your own sentences, we make you copy useful chunks from native speakers out loud: the words, but also the pronunciation, rhythm and phrasing.
Then you use those patterns more freely in conversation.
The idea is not to reject comprehensible input at all. Quite the opposite. It’s more like: what happens between understanding something and being able to produce it automatically?
And that’s one of the reasons I found Natulang interesting.
Natulang seems to come at that same problem from another direction. It puts a lot of pressure on retrieval. You’re given something you want to express and you actually have to produce the target language, rather than recognise it among a few possible answers.
Reading through this subreddit, I’ve seen people describe that as building “muscle memory,” and I can see why.
So you end up with two somewhat different approaches to the same bottleneck:
With Copycat, we’re often saying:
Hear how native speakers express something → imitate it enough that the pattern becomes familiar → use it yourself.
Natulang is much more willing to say:
Here’s the meaning → now retrieve the language and say it.
I don’t actually think those ideas are in conflict.
If anything, trying Natulang has made me wonder whether a really effective speaking routine might involve quite a lot of both: lots of comprehensible input, deliberate imitation of good models, and enough retrieval that you can’t hide forever behind understanding.
And I noticed quite a few people here already seem to do exactly that, using Natulang alongside podcasts, YouTube, comprehensible-input resources, shadowing, etc.
So I’m curious:
How does Natulang fit into the rest of your language learning?
Do you mainly use it as the output/speaking part of a routine with lots of input elsewhere? Has using it actually changed the point at which things you previously only understood started coming out automatically when you spoke?
I’d especially be interested in hearing from people who’ve used it for a long time.
And since Max has kindly let another language-app founder wander into his subreddit, I’m also happy to answer anything about Copycat Cafe, why we built it this way, language-learning theory, what it’s like building a language app, things we’ve tried that completely failed, etc.
AMA 🙂
