What it is
A quiet, unhurried app for children who cannot read yet. Every word is spoken aloud and shown as a picture, so the whole app works by ear.
Learns by ear
Each word is heard, found among pictures, and said back. There is no reading anywhere in the child's side of the app.
Short on purpose
A lesson is a few minutes. You set a daily goal, and a daily limit if you want one — after which the nest goes to sleep.
Nothing to lose
No scores, no lives, no timers, no streak for a child to break. A wrong answer only brings help a little sooner.
Grows with the child
Two pictures to choose between for a two-year-old, four for a five-year-old, and it adjusts on evidence rather than on a single lucky tap.
Remembers what is hard
Words a child finds tricky come back sooner. Words they know come back later, so time is spent where it helps.
For siblings
Up to four children, each with their own animal and their own progress — kept separately for every language.
How a lesson goes
Each of the six categories is three lessons, then reviews.
- MeetWords arrive one at a time: shown, said, then said again slowly.
- ExploreEvery picture in the category, free to touch and hear, with nothing to get wrong.
- FindNuri names a word and the child points to it. Miss once and she says it again; miss twice and she looks towards the answer.
- PlayBubbles to pop, pairs to match, and a parade of the words learned so far.
- KeepEvery word learned becomes a sticker. Touching a sticker says the word, so the sticker book is quietly revision.
Seven languages
Choose the language spoken at home and the language being learned. Progress is kept separately for each, so switching never muddles them.
For the grown-ups
Behind a question only an adult can answer, so a child cannot wander into settings.
What they are learning
Minutes and lessons for today and this week, strongest and weakest categories, and every word with the level it has reached.
The tricky words
The words that are not sticking, each with a button to hear it — so you can practise them together away from the screen.
Healthy habits
A daily goal, an optional daily limit, and a bedtime after which the app grows dimmer and calmer. A lesson in progress always finishes.
Our privacy promise
The short version. The full policy says the same thing at greater length.
- ✓Nothing leaves the device. The app makes no network requests at all. It works the same on a plane as at home.
- ✓No account. There is nothing to sign up for, and no email address is asked for.
- ✓No adverts and no tracking. No analytics, no advertising identifiers, no third-party software development kits.
- ✓No chat and no links out. There is nowhere in the child's side of the app that leads anywhere else.
- ✓Almost nothing is kept. A nickname if you choose to give one, the animal your child picked, an age band, and what they have learned — all of it on the device only.
Where it is up to
Nuri's Nest is in testing and is not on the App Store yet. Words are currently spoken by the device's own voice while the recordings are being made, which means the voice quality varies between languages — and Kazakh, which iOS has no voice for, is silent for now. If you would like to try an early build, write to [email protected].