Yasu — Greek that works with the phone offline
A Greek course for people who live in Cyprus rather than visit it: twenty units, spaced repetition running quietly underneath, and speech the phone synthesises itself, with no server involved.
Expats hear Greek every day and still give up on language apps inside a month. The apps are full of either tourist phrases or grammar drills, and neither sounds anything like the conversation they had at the bakery this morning. There is a technical trap underneath as well: if every spoken word costs a trip to a server and a fraction of a cent, an app that gets two minutes of attention a day will stall at exactly the moment it has to answer instantly.
The course runs to 76 lessons across 20 units, with an SM-2 scheduler underneath it — fuzzed intervals, ease factors, relearning states — while all the learner ever sees is a daily streak. ONNX voice models synthesise the speech on the device, cast to a different voice per role, so audio works on a plane and costs nothing per word. When an answer goes wrong, a language model explains why in the learner’s own language. The store build strips API keys and developer tooling out before shipping, and a secret scan runs before every release to check that it did.
