Ways to use it
For students: learn a language by watching what you love
Textbooks teach you the language. Native speakers, at their own pace, in stories you care about, are what make it stick. RainbowSay lets you study from exactly that material — the anime, dramas, series, YouTube channels and podcasts you’d watch anyway — without needing subtitles you can already understand.
A week that works
Most evenings — 20 to 30 minutes of Listening. Put on an episode and run a Listening session. You don’t have to study every sentence: let easy ones go by with Continue, and slow down for the ones that surprise you.
- Hover the words you didn’t know; the reading and meaning appear on the spot — the reading spells out the pronunciation of kanji, Chinese characters or any script you can’t read yet.
- Replay Original, then Translation, then Original again. The word-by-word highlight ties the sounds to the words.
- When a line makes you wonder why, ask the chat: “why is it the past tense here?”, “is this rude?”.
Two or three times a week — 10 minutes of Speaking. Say out loud what you picked up. Practice routines has three ways to do it: shadow lines from your show, check yourself by hearing your sentence translated back, and role-play with the chat.
On a night off — Subtitles. Live Subtitles caption anything in your language without pausing, and the Original line keeps your reading practice going in the background.
Sunday — 10 minutes of review. Open the Dashboard, pick a session from the week, and replay each Original before you look at the translation. The heatmap and streak show the hours quietly adding up.
Match the settings to your level
| Your level | Try |
|---|---|
| Beginner | Eagerness High and a sentence length limit of 6–8 s for short, digestible cards. Pick shows you already know. |
| Intermediate | The defaults. Let the easy sentences go; chat about the hard ones. |
| Advanced | Auto-pause off: the show never stops, cards roll by as a running translation, and Space stops on a sentence worth studying. |
Learning a language whose script you can’t read yet? The card’s readings are made for you, and you can set the output language to whichever language you’re most comfortable in — it doesn’t have to be English.
Before an oral exam or a trip
- Collect the phrases you’ll need by running a Listening session on interviews, vlogs or travel videos about the same situations.
- Drill them in a Speaking session until the translation that comes back is what you meant.
- Use the role-play routine for the conversation itself: ordering, asking directions, introducing yourself.
Make your allowance last
You start with free credit, and students can ask for more: email us from your school or university address and we’ll add extra credit to your account, so you can study properly before deciding on a plan. Details are on the Pricing page.
In the meantime: text-only cards use less, Suspend skips intros and ads, and silence is always free.