About Tanaar

Yes and no. I will not claim you will get fluent in Dutch by only using Tanaar. To learn a language, you have to use it. Try speaking it with Dutch people, using it at the checkout or in a bar, reading and listening. I highly recommend taking Dutch lessons or going to language cafes, as they offer a safe space to practice the language (the Dutch are notorious for falling back to English the moment they notice someone isn't fluent in Dutch). It's a well-meant habit, but it means you often need to actively look for chances to practice instead of stumbling into them. That's where Tanaar comes in as a tool on the side. Use it to practice grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, and to simply build your familiarity with the language in your own time, on your own schedule, so that when you do end up in a conversation, a shop, or a language cafe, you've already got the basics a little more automatic.

Everyone that wants to learn Dutch is welcome to use it, but I created it with expats living in the Netherlands in mind. You're already exposed to Dutch around you: on street signs, at the supermarket, in emails from your gemeente, on the radio, and you want to get better at the language instead of just recognizing it passively. It also works well if you're studying for the NT2 exam (Nederlands als Tweede Taal, the Dutch civic and language exam for non-native speakers), since Tanaar's questions are built around the same A1 to B2 range that exam covers. But you don't need to be preparing for an exam to get something out of it. If you just want a Dutch tutor that adapts to you instead of treating you like a beginner from zero, it's built for that too.

I'm satisfied with the quality of the learning profile and the personalized lesson plan, but the quality of the personalized questions isn't consistent enough yet. Generating a good lesson plan is one thing, generating brand new, correct, well-phrased Dutch questions on the fly is a different and harder problem, and I'd rather take the time to get it right than ship something inconsistent. There are a few active spots in premium testing the beta version right now, and that feedback (which questions felt off, which ones were genuinely useful) will help improve the generation of questions before it opens up more widely.

Yes, absolutely. After the assessment period, you get 50 questions every week based on your learning profile. The difference is that these 50 questions are picked from the existing database of questions and not created specifically for you. Tanaar picks the questions it thinks will help you progress best from the shared library, based on what your learning profile says you need more of. So free users still get an adaptive, personalized selection each week, just from an existing pool of questions rather than freshly generated ones.

I wanted to create something without interruptions from ads or a built in monetization game ("buy additional hearts to continue"). Still, Tanaar uses AI to analyse your learning profile, create your lesson plans, and tailor questions that help you progress, and none of that runs for free in the background. The paid version covers these costs, as well as hosting, storage, and compute (the internet isn't free, unfortunately, however much we'd all like it to be). My goal is to keep Tanaar affordable, around the price of a good glass of wine on a terrace, or two cappuccino's, not a full subscription-app price tag for something that's meant to be a helpful daily habit, not a financial burden.