On air · the language guessing game
Tells plays you a few seconds of a real voice or shows you one line of text. Name the language, then learn the tell that gives it away. 138 languages, a free daily broadcast, and after a week you'll spot them everywhere.
Coming soon to iPhone, iPad and Android
How to play
Ear round
Play a few seconds of a native speaker. Real recordings, not text-to-speech. Slow it down if you need to, then tune the station dial to the language and lock in your answer.
Portuguese or Russian? Zulu or Xhosa? Your ears will surprise you.
Eye round
A single line in its own script: Georgian, Amharic, Khmer, Cyrillic, Devanagari and 25 more. Tap the letter that gives the language away, then pick the language.
Get it right or wrong, the tell is revealed and explained, so every round teaches you something.
Learn the tell
A letter, a sound, a pattern. Once you know it, you can't unsee it: on menus, street signs, packaging and film credits.
The tell
ł, plus ą and ę with a little tail. Clusters like szcz, rz and cz are everywhere.
The tell
ő and ű, the double acute accent, appear only in Hungarian.
The tell
Round letters that hang above and below the line, and no capital letters.
The tell
Each character is a whole syllable, and sentences end with four dots in a square.
The tell
The middle dot in l·l, grave accents like à and è, and -ció where Spanish has -ción.
The tell
Dotless ı next to dotted i, plus ğ and ş. Long words built from stacked suffixes.
The tell
ș and ț with a comma below. A Romance language with Slavic-looking letters.
The tell
ħ, ġ, ċ and ż, and the pair għ. A Semitic language written in Latin letters.
Ways to play
Free
Five rounds, spoken and written, the same for every player. Keep your signal streak alive and share your score without spoiling the answers.
Pro
Keep answering until your lives run out and the static takes over. How long can you stay on air?
Pro
17 regions, from First Frequencies to the Silk Road and Pacific Drift. Earn stars at every stop.
Pro
Look-alike languages side by side, with the differences explained before you play.
Pro
Unlimited Ear and Eye rounds on Easy, Normal or Hard.
Free
Every language you meet lands on your map, with field notes and the languages it is often confused with.
Face-offs
The hardest calls are between neighbours. 26 face-offs teach you how to tell them apart, with the tells side by side and real examples, then put you to the test.
Collect them all
138 languages in 30 scripts, from Japanese and Arabic to Hawaiian, Yiddish and Cherokee. Every one has its own page with its Ear and Eye tells, a field note and the languages it is often confused with.
Earn XP, finish daily missions, unlock achievements and climb from Tourist to Linguist.
Pricing
No account, no card
$24.99/year or $2.99/week, with a free trial for new subscribers
US prices; local prices vary. Subscriptions renew automatically and can be cancelled in your App Store or Google Play account settings.
FAQ
Tells is a language guessing game for iPhone, iPad and Android. You hear a few seconds of real speech or read a single line of text, name the language, and then see the tell: the letter, sound or pattern that gives that language away. After a week of daily rounds you start spotting languages on menus, street signs and in films.
A tell is the giveaway feature of a language. ł means Polish. ő and ű mean Hungarian. Sentences ending in ። mean Amharic. Spanish opens questions with ¿, and Turkish has a dotless ı next to a dotted i. Every round in Tells ends by showing you the tell, so each answer teaches you something you can use on the next one.
138 languages written in 30 scripts, from Japanese, Arabic and Hindi to Hawaiian, Yiddish, Cherokee and Inuktitut. 89 of them have Ear rounds with recordings of real native speakers; the rest are Eye rounds you identify from writing.
Yes. Ear rounds use recordings of native speakers from Google's FLEURS speech dataset (CC BY 4.0), not synthetic text-to-speech. Written samples are hand-written or come from the Tatoeba sentence collection (CC BY 2.0 FR).
The daily broadcast, five rounds a day, is free forever. Tells Pro unlocks all 138 languages, Survival, the World Tour, every face-off and unlimited practice for $2.99 per week or $24.99 per year in the US, with a free trial for new subscribers. Prices vary by country.
Face-offs put look-alike languages side by side and teach you how to tell them apart: Spanish vs Portuguese, Czech vs Slovak, Thai vs Lao, Mandarin vs Cantonese, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, American vs British English and 20 more. Each one explains the differences with real examples before you play.
Yes. All clips and written samples ship with the app, so every round works without Wi-Fi or mobile data. There is no account and your progress stays on your device. Only the zoomable language map needs a connection, and a simple dot map is shown when you are offline.
Anyone curious about the world: travellers, polyglots, language learners, geography and GeoGuessr fans, trivia players and people who just want to know what language that was on the train. No prior knowledge is needed; the World Tour starts with the most common languages and builds up.
iPhone and iPad with iOS 15 or later, and Android phones and tablets.
Five rounds. Free every day. Can you name them all?
Coming soon to iPhone, iPad and Android
