A language per child
Story language is set on the child profile, so one child can hear Spanish and another English without changing anything else.
The language you grew up in
Bedtime stories in the language you want them to keep
Many children understand a family language perfectly and answer only in English. Linguists call it receptive bilingualism, and parents usually describe it as watching something slip away one evening at a time.
Free to try. No credit card required.
Made for shared story time
Why bedtime is the moment that works
Heritage languages are rarely lost by decision. School, friends, and screens arrive in one language, and the other narrows to the kitchen. Children keep understanding long after they stop replying.
Bedtime is unusually good ground for this. It repeats nightly, it is calm, it carries no correction or testing, and the language arrives attached to warmth rather than to homework. That is roughly the opposite of a language app.
TaleLumi lets you set a story language for each child, separately from the language you use the app in. A grandparent can read in Russian while the interface stays in English, or a story can arrive in Spanish and be narrated by a Spanish voice.
Why it works
Personal enough to matter, simple enough for tonight
Narrated by a matching voice
Narration uses a voice for that language rather than an English voice reading foreign words.
Your interface stays yours
The app language and the story language are separate. Read the buttons in English and the story in Russian.
What changes when the language arrives as a story
Why stories work where lessons do not
No performance. A child asked to speak a language often freezes. A child listening to a story is not being assessed, and the words go in anyway.
The vocabulary is theirs. A story about a child who loves dinosaurs teaches the words that child will actually reach for, which a curriculum ordered by grammar never does.
It repeats without feeling repetitive. Bedtime happens every night whether or not anyone is motivated, which is exactly the consistency language keeping requires and rarely gets.
Every complete TaleLumi story is newly created from the choices a parent makes.
Built around real routines
Families this is built for
One parent, one language
Keep the quieter language present on the nights that parent is not the one doing bedtime.
Grandparents who speak it
Give a child enough of the language to hold a conversation with people who love them and speak little English.
Understands but will not speak
Lower the stakes. Listening keeps the language alive until a child is ready to use it.
Wonder, written around them.
Turn what your child loves today into tonight's story.
Create one story now, then continue the adventure as a connected book tomorrow.
Questions from parents
A little more clarity
Which languages can stories be written in?
English, Spanish, French and Russian, both for the written story and for narration.
Can each child have a different story language?
Yes. Story language is set per child profile, so siblings can hear different languages on the same account.
Is the app itself translated?
Yes, into all four languages, and it is a separate setting. You can run the app in English while your child's stories arrive in another language.
Will the narration sound native?
Narration uses a voice selected for that language rather than an English voice reading foreign text, so the pronunciation is appropriate for the language.