Spaced Repetition in Disguise

Moving to Paris, finally building i·CANTO, and learning French with it.

I learned most of my Spanish from songs, Manu Chao more than anyone. The idea for an app built on that came to me in Barcelona in 2019, then sat for years, through more time in Madrid and a couple of years freelancing in New York. I missed Europe and I missed living in another language, so in 2024 I moved to Paris to build it for real, with myself as the guinea pig. I'd learn French with it.

The bet is that a song is almost perfect input for a language. The same phrases come back verse after verse, right at the emotional peak, and you replay it a hundred times without anyone asking you to. It's spaced repetition in disguise. Then in 2025 Apple Music started translating lyrics line by line, and early this year Spotify took its translations worldwide. For a while I thought that was the end of the app. But a translation only tells you what a line says. i·CANTO is closer to Song Exploder for lyrics: it unpacks the slang, the grammar and the cultural references, conjugates the verbs, turns a song into a lesson at your level, and keeps every word you save attached to the line you found it in. It's the app I wished existed, and two years in, my French is genuinely good because of it.

Learning a language also changes what you listen to. Once French started making sense, I found artists I'd never have heard otherwise. That's what an i·CANTO profile is for: the languages you're learning and the songs you're learning them through, which says more about your taste than any playlist. You can follow people whose taste you trust, and send a friend a song that opens as their own lesson. If you want to see what I've been learning French with, here's my profile.