Lani

Learn Slovene by living in a little village. Lani is an Android game with a pixel-art village whose people speak to you, a tutor that knows what you got wrong yesterday, and a grammar book that opens as you go. Behind it runs a Claude Code session: your own tutor, which writes new dialogs, stories and exercises for you as you progress.

→ lani.page for a tour with pictures.

Lani is in early, active development and is used daily by one learner (Jan). Slovene is the first language; Italian (Friuli), German (Kärnten) and English (Lakeland) villages exist for visits.

What's in it

• The village. A dozen villagers with their own days: the farmer in his field, the smith at his forge, Stari Janez telling a legend by the fire every evening. They ask you for help in Slovene; what you build with their requests grows the village.
• Scenes and dialogs. Close-up scenes (the kitchen, the fire, the field) where you find the words in the picture, play I spy with the village's children («Vidim, vidim nekaj, česar ti ne vidiš …») and talk to people. Dialog turns adapt to you: choose, tap the picture, type the missing word, or say it.
• A grammar book that grows with you. The six cases, aspect, the dual: a page opens when you're ready for it, the dialogs only ask for what you've met, and your mistakes show up on the rule's page.
• Words that stay. Spaced repetition (SM-2) in many forms: flashcards, listening, dictation, speaking, and once you know a word, its conjugations and cases as the grammar book opens them. Your words come back in the dialogs too: a turn that asks for one of them counts as its review, and the tutor writes them into the day's conversations.
• Stories and a notebook. Legends told in chapters by the fire (Martin Krpan, Zlatorog, Peter Klepec), each written down in a hand-drawn notebook with sketches.
• In the car. An Android Auto mode with listening drills, echoes and quick responses for long drives.
• A tutor you can talk to. The app's chat goes to your Claude Code session: ask about any exercise, bookmark an answer, reply to a message from last week. Send a photo of a sign, a menu or a worksheet ("what does it say?", "check my answers"): it leaves the phone without its location or other metadata, stays on your machine (never in git) and reaches Claude only through the tutor, as the chat does (docs/privacy.md).

How it works

Android app ──HTTP/SSE──► bridge (Bun/TS) ──MCP channel──► Claude Code session (your tutor)
                            │                              └─ skills: lani-*, lani-studio
                            └─ your data: progress, mistakes, reviews, village (JSON, on your machine, in git)

• companion/android/ — the app (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose); the village, scenes and people are drawn in code.
• companion/bridge/ — the bridge: serves the app, keeps your data, and lets the tutor publish content.
• companion/cultures/, companion/scenes/, companion/grammar/ — the villages, scenes, stories and grammar pages.
• .claude/ — the tutor's skills and hooks; LEARNING_SYSTEM.md is its method.

Run it yourself

You need a machine that stays on (Linux or macOS), Claude Code with a Claude plan or API key, Bun and an Android phone. A wizard sets up the rest in about 15 minutes:

git clone https://github.com/fentas/lani.git && cd lani
companion/bin/lani-setup                     # the learner, their data, a private remote, voices, network, pairing

It keeps the learner's data outside the checkout, as a git repository of its own (~/.local/share/lani/<id>), committed after each session. Run it again to change anything. The guide, and the steps by hand: docs/setup.md; what leaves your machine: docs/privacy.md; when something is off: docs/troubleshooting.md. Everything else (pairing, Tailscale, voices, speech recognition, the bridge as a service, backups) is in companion/README.md. The tutor also works on its own, in the terminal: docs/claude-tutor.md.

The app: install lani-<version>.apk from the releases, and let your bridge offer the next ones as updates with companion/bin/release-app --github. Or build it yourself in Docker, with no JDK or Android SDK: companion/bin/lani-build-app --release (an app built with your own key updates only from your own builds).

Contributing

Corrections to the Slovene are especially welcome: much of the content is machine-written and marked so until a native speaker has read it. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Licence

Lani is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0 or later. It began as a fork of m98/fluent (MIT); the parts from it stay available under MIT as well (an install from the time it was called Fluent moves over with docs/migrate-from-fluent.md). Dictionary data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0), the Kalam font (OFL) and the synthesized sounds (CC0): see NOTICE.md.