About tendi

Hi, I'm Nathan. I'm British, and I'm learning Brazilian Portuguese. I love the language and the music, and I want to understand what people are really saying.

Duolingo doesn't help me much any more: I can already speak at around B2, and the slow, polished sentences don't sound like anything I hear in a song or on the street. Jumping to a whole podcast is the opposite problem. It's daunting, and an hour of speech I half follow isn't a very effective way to learn.

Why "tendi"?

While I was studying Brazilian Portuguese, I kept saying tendi. It's what Brazilians say for "I understood" or "got it": a clipped entendi, with the first syllable swallowed, just like pra for para.

Entendi comes from entender, to understand, which goes back to the Latin intendere: to stretch towards something. That's a good picture of listening in a language you're still learning. You lean in until it clicks. And the name is a small example of what the app trains: hearing "tendi" and knowing it's "entendi".

What tendi does

tendi sits in the gap between apps and podcasts. Every day you get five short clips of real speech, taken from real videos, and it takes about three minutes. You type what you hear, and tendi compares it with the transcript word by word. When you miss something, it often shows why: people shorten and blur words (para becomes pra), and that's exactly what apps tend to skip.

Each clip has a difficulty, so you can aim for the pace you're ready for, and you can slow a clip down when it's too quick. If you want to go further, you can translate the clip into your own language for bonus XP. The meaning counts, not the exact words.

There are no accounts. Your streak and progress stay on your device. Portuguese came first, but Spanish, French and German are here too.