Pimsleur is the fifty-year-old audio method, still the best way to build a spoken base hands-free.
Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App Store| Saygood | Pimsleur | |
|---|---|---|
| Open-ended live conversation | ✓ | ✗ |
| Real-time speech-to-speech | ✓ | ✗ |
| Interrupt mid-sentence | ✓ | ✗ |
| Slang dial | ✓four steps | ✗ |
| Speaking-speed dial | ✓four steps | ✗playback speed |
| Patience dial | ✓ | ✗a fixed pause |
| Corrections dial | ✓ | ✗ |
| Immersion dial | ✓five steps | ✗ |
| Change the dials mid-call | ✓ | ✗ |
| Partners you invent | ✓ | ✗ |
| Scenarios you write | ✓ | ✗ |
| Level from a spoken call | ✓from a 5-minute call | ✗ |
| Recap carried to the next call | ✓ | ✓spaced review |
| Structured course | ✗in build — August 2026* | ✓ |
| Languages | 20+ | 50+ |
| Platforms | iPhone · online only | iPhone, Android, web, CarPlay · offline |
| Price, US iOS | $29.99/mo · $199.99/yr | $20.99/mo |
Of the 14 things above, Saygood does 13. Pimsleur does 2.
✓ yes ~ partly ✗ no
* Roadmap, not a shipped feature — and scored as a loss for us until it ships. If a date slips we will change this line rather than quietly leave it up.
Thirty minutes of Pimsleur a day will build a beginner’s base better than thirty minutes of talking to us, because it knows what to feed you and when to bring it back. Then you meet someone who does not wait for the beep.
It is hands-free, eyes-free and offline — you can do it while driving, and you can do nothing with us without a connection.
Also true, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It covers 50+ languages, including a lot of small ones we do not — in which case this is not a comparison, it is just your answer.
you are starting out, you commute, or your language is not one of ours.
you know the phrases and have found that a real person does not say the next line you expected.
A course is a good way to get your first few hundred words. The mistake is staying there for two years. Speaking is a separate skill from recognising, it is the slowest one to build, and the only way to build it is to talk to someone who is not waiting for you — as early as you possibly can.
I speak five languages and I have tried more or less everything under the sun to learn them — courses, flashcards, tutors, every app in this comparison set that I could get my hands on. The gap that never got closed by any of it was the same one every time: actually speaking, in real time, to someone who is not waiting for you. That is the only reason Saygood exists.
Yes. It is one of the few things in this category whose effectiveness is not really disputed. The complaints are about cost, about pace, and about the fact that it is audio-only — not about whether it works.
No, and it does not claim to. You speak into a gap of a fixed length and the recording continues regardless of what you said. That builds recall and pronunciation; it does not build the ability to handle a reply you did not expect, and it cannot speed up, slow down or get less formal because you asked it to.
This is the pairing we would actually recommend to a beginner. Pimsleur for the commute, to build the base. Saygood from the moment you can say a few things, to find out whether the base survives contact with a conversation — not at the end, in parallel.
Pimsleur, on both plans: $20.99/mo and $164.99/yr on iOS against our $29.99 and $199.99. Though if you are doing both, do the maths on the pair before you commit to either annual.
Not today, and that is the honest answer — you open the app, pick someone, and talk. One is in build, and it is deliberately not another course: rather than a library of lessons, it works out what you can and cannot say from the calls you have already had, and steers the next conversation toward the gap without ever showing you a lesson screen. The first piece — a spoken level taken from a real five-minute conversation instead of a multiple-choice quiz — is due in August 2026. If that date moves, this page moves with it.
Yes, and it is the single most underrated thing in the app. Slang is a dial in Saygood — mostly clean, everyday, street, full slang — and you can move it in the middle of a call, along with speaking speed, how patient they are, and how hard they correct you. Courses teach the careful, neutral, written register almost exclusively, and that is not the register anybody speaks to you in. Learning only that version of a language is how people end up fluent on paper and lost in a bar.
Ten minutes of calling, free, no card. That is enough to find out whether talking to an AI partner does anything for you.