Learn Dutch: Polygloat

Learn Dutch the way you picked up your first language: by understanding it.

Polygloat is a comprehensible input app. Instead of flashcards, streaks and grammar drills, you watch a feed of short videos in the language you're learning. Tap any word in the subtitles to see what it means in that sentence. The app remembers every word you meet, works out how hard each video is for you specifically, and keeps showing you videos you can mostly follow.

Why Dutch is hard to practise in the Netherlands

If you live here, you already know the problem. Everyone speaks excellent English, and the moment your Dutch falters the conversation switches. Meanwhile Dutch news and podcasts are pitched at native adults, so an hour of them teaches you very little. You are surrounded by Dutch and almost none of it is input you can use.

Short videos fix that, because they are the one kind of Dutch you control. Watch two minutes on the tram, tap the three words you did not know, and you have understood a piece of Dutch end to end.

How it works

• Watch short videos from creators in the language you're learning
• Tap any word for its meaning — the sense used in this sentence, not a dictionary dump
• Translate a whole sentence when a line gets away from you
• Every word you meet is tracked, building a picture of your vocabulary
• Each video is scored against that vocabulary, so the feed stays at your level
• Words come back in new videos, days apart — spaced repetition without a deck

No flashcards

A word you are due to review turns up in a different sentence, from a different speaker, at the right moment. You never work through a deck. You keep watching.

Dutch word forms, handled

Dutch separates its verbs (opbellen becomes belt … op), inflects adjectives and builds long compounds. The subtitles link each form back to the word it belongs to, so looking up gebeld teaches you bellen rather than a form you will never find in a dictionary.

Also in the app

• A placement test that finds your starting level in minutes
• Progress tracking: vocabulary size, streaks and daily goals
• Word-level subtitle timing tuned for learners
• Record and upload your own videos for other learners

Languages

Learn Dutch, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese. The app itself — menus, word meanings and sentence translations — is available in English, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese in both Simplified and Traditional script, French, Turkish, Ukrainian and Arabic.

What Polygloat is not

It is not a grammar course and not exam preparation: it does not teach to the inburgering or HSK syllabus. It is the input half — the hours of understandable Dutch a textbook cannot give you. Most people who get fluent use both.

Polygloat is for learners aged 16 and up. The library is curated for learning value, and community uploads are moderated.

Free to use. Built by an independent developer who got tired of flashcards.