Why I built Tiny Worlds

I love languages. I've always loved languages. I'm the kind of person who gets excited about how a sentence is built differently in another language, or why some words exist in one language and not in another.

In 2022, I started learning Tibetan. I'm French, and Tibetan has absolutely nothing to do with French. The alphabet is completely different, the words are in a different order, the whole logic of the language is different. There's really nothing in common between the two.

I spent months looking for content I could actually follow as a complete beginner. It barely existed. Everything was either made for native children (still too fast, too much assumed knowledge) or it was grammar textbooks. The kind of stuff that makes you feel like you're failing before you've even started.

What I really needed was much simpler than that: slow, visual, repetitive content that would let me get used to hearing the language. Not study it. Just be around it long enough for things to start making sense.

That's also when I started reading a lot about comprehensible input, this idea backed by decades of linguistic research that you don't learn a language by studying rules. You acquire it by being exposed to messages you can understand. It's how every child picks up their first language. And it works for adults too, as long as the content is at the right level.

The problem is that this kind of content barely exists for real beginners. So I decided to build it for French, because that's my native language and that's the one I can do it for. And ideally, other people could do the same for their own language. That's kind of the dream: a collective effort where native speakers build these resources for others, because by definition, you can only really do this for a language you know from the inside.

So that's what Tiny Worlds is. I make the videos, I build the platform, I write everything. It's just me. And the hardest part of that first year, understanding a word one day and losing it a week later, is the exact thing I built the platform to fix. It quietly keeps track of every word you meet and brings it back right before you'd forget it, so the time you put in actually adds up.

It's the kind of platform I'd want to have when I'm starting a language from zero. Something that holds your hand through the first year, keeps things simple, and makes sure you don't give up before it even has a chance to work.