Web · PWA — Studio project, 2026 · Free to read & learn
Versos
Learn Spanish or English through poems — read, listen, reveal the translation line by line, and let spaced repetition make it stick. Free to read & learn, no accounts.
Learn Spanish or English through poems — read, listen, reveal the translation line by line, and let spaced repetition make it stick. Free to read & learn, no accounts.
Language apps drill sentences. Poems are why you stay.
Versos teaches Spanish and English in both directions through public-domain poetry: read the poem, hear it read aloud, reveal the translation line by line, then let an SM-2 spaced-repetition engine bring the lines back until they stick. There are no accounts and no backend for your progress — everything you learn stays in your browser, and the whole thing works offline as a PWA.
We designed it, built it, and — the part we are proudest of — built the machinery that keeps its content legal.
Three loops, one quiet interface: the poem, the voice, and the review queue.
Poems open in the original language; translations reveal one line at a time, so the reader works before the answer arrives.
Every poem is voiced with custom neural TTS Castilian voices — built without cloning any human speaker.
An SM-2 spaced-repetition engine schedules reviews locally — progress is private by design because it never leaves the device.
The interesting engineering is in the pipeline, not the pages.
A rights-gated content pipeline enforces Spain’s life-plus-80 public-domain rule as an automated test guard — a poem that isn’t provably out of copyright cannot ship. Corpus and music carry meticulous CC BY attribution.
TTS audio, glossing and CEFR grading are precomputed at build time. Scaling Versos is a bandwidth problem, not a GPU problem.
One Cloudflare Pages Function proxies TTS and music from R2, with a D1 ledger — everything else is static files at the edge.
Versos is a free-to-learn, public thing we made because we wanted it to exist: poetry as the front door to a language, engineered so that privacy and copyright are properties of the architecture, not promises in a policy.