SoundlyThe animal is the same in every language. Only the word changes — which is exactly why an animal is such a good place to start a second language.
is one of the nineteen languages in Soundly Pro — the word written, and spoken by a native speaker. Get the app.
Nineteen languages, one horse. Tap English to hear it spoken and then the horse; tap any other language to see the word. The spoken versions of the other eighteen are native-speaker recordings inside the app.
The table
- English
- Norsk
- Svenska
- Dansk
- Suomi
- Deutsch
- Nederlands
- Français
- Español
- Português
- Italiano
- Polski
- Русский
- Türkçe
- 中文
- 日本語
- 한국어
- Indonesia
- Tiếng Việt
Nineteen languages, each spoken by a native speaker, and the written word to match. English is free; the other eighteen come with Soundly Pro.
What actually happens: the child picks from a grid of drawings, taps one, and a real photograph opens while a voice names it in the chosen language — then the horse itself. Four things on one tap.
Why this works on a small child
A second language is hard when it arrives as a separate subject with its own vocabulary to memorise. It is much easier when it is a second name for something already known. The photograph and the sound carry the meaning, so the only new thing is the word — and the child already has somewhere to put it.
That is also why the window matters. Starting before roughly age seven is associated with native-like pronunciation, and young learners do best of all on exactly this kind of material: spoken single words, heard repeatedly.1 There is more on the bilingual question here, including why the fear that it delays speech is rejected by the clinical bodies.
Each animal has its own page
Every one in the table has a full page with the photograph at size, the recording, and that language list — cow, pig, horse, sheep, dog, cat, duck, rooster, turkey, crow, mouse and bee.
These twelve are the free ones. The app holds 72 subjects across six worlds on the same pattern — 360 photographs, 361 recordings, every name in all 19 languages, and the English spoken by a paid human voice actor rather than a machine.
Hear all 361 of them
Soundly is 360 real photographs and 361 real recordings across six worlds, in 19 languages, read by a human voice actor. The twelve farm animals are free.
References
- Hartshorne, J. K., et al. A critical period for second language acquisition: evidence from 2/3 million English speakers, Cognition. The language words themselves are read from the Soundly app's own localisation files, so this page and the app cannot disagree.