Sybaris: Italian by Listening

Sybaris is an Italian listening app. You press play on a short episode, the transcript scrolls in time with the voice, and when a word trips you up you hold it and get the meaning right there - without leaving the sentence. That's the whole idea. Most apps hand you exercises about Italian. This one gives you Italian to listen to, and makes the hard parts easy to look into. HOW IT WORKS Short episodes. Most run three to six minutes, which fits in a queue, a walk, or the last few minutes before you fall asleep. New ones land every week. The transcript follows the voice, word by word. When you drift off and lose the thread — everyone does — you glance down and you're back in the sentence. Hold any word for its meaning, its dictionary form, and an example of it used elsewhere. Playback pauses while you read and picks up where it left off. Save the words you want to keep. Sybaris saves the sentence you heard it in along with it, because "affrontare" on its own is a lot harder to remember than the line someone said it in. Reviews come back later, spaced out over days, in that same sentence. Grade yourself honestly and the easy words stop bothering you. English lines sit under the Italian if you want them, and disappear if you'd rather struggle a bit first. Playback runs at 0.75x when full speed is too much. LEVELS Episodes are labelled A1 through C1. Start one level below where you think you are — understanding Italian at speaking speed is much harder than reading it, and there's no prize for picking the hard one. ON PACE AND STREAKS You set a daily listening goal in minutes. There's a streak, but a handful of word reviews counts for the day just as much as hitting your minutes — so a day when you couldn't listen isn't a day you lost. No leagues, no lost-progress warnings, no notifications trying to guilt you back in: at most two a day, and only if you ask for them. ABOUT THE AUDIO Episode scripts and voices are made with AI, then reviewed before publishing. They aren't recordings of real conversations, and it seems better to say that plainly than to let you work it out yourself. What you get in exchange is a catalogue that's actually pitched at your level, with word-accurate timing that hand-cut podcasts don't come with. NO PAYWALLS No subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no ads, no tracking, and no password to invent — your account is created quietly in the background and everything syncs to it. You can delete it, and everything in it, from the More tab in two taps. Made by one person in Germany. If a translation is wrong or something breaks, write to [email protected] — the reply comes from me.