FreeTalk: an interactive Polish course, A1 to B2.

The problem

Polish is famously hard: seven cases, three genders, aspect pairs and diacritics everywhere. Most learning apps grade answers by exact string match, so a learner who types zolw instead of żółw, or picks the right case with a typo, gets the same "wrong" as someone who has no idea. That kills motivation and teaches nothing.

What we built

FreeTalk is a structured Polish course from A1 to B2 for Ukrainian, Russian and English speakers.

• Grammar explained simply, unit by unit, with exercises right after each explanation.
• Polish-aware grading that tells a missing diacritic apart from a wrong ending and a wrong case, and explains the difference.
• Spaced repetition with the FSRS algorithm brings words and forms back just before you'd forget them.
• Learner analytics: every graded answer is logged, so the course improves where learners actually struggle.
• Over a hundred public pages (grammar guides, vocabulary topics and course overviews in three languages) that bring learners in from search.

How it's built

A bun monorepo in strict TypeScript. The shared @freetalk/content package holds the activity schemas (Zod), a gap-fill markup parser and the grading engine, used by both the client and the server, which re-grades every answer. The API is a Cloudflare Worker (Hono, OpenAPI) over PostgreSQL via Hyperdrive with Drizzle migrations.

The app is Expo / React Native Web, one codebase for web and Android, localised with i18next. The public SEO pages are rendered to static HTML at build time and deployed to Cloudflare Pages with sitemaps, hreflang clusters and IndexNow support, so search engines see real content instead of an empty app shell.

What clients get from it

FreeTalk is where we built domain-specific grading logic, a content pipeline, learner analytics and multilingual SEO for a JavaScript app. That's the same toolkit any education, content or marketplace product needs. See our custom software development and Cloudflare engineering services.