About

A note from the founder on fear, fluency, and the two habits that actually change how a new language feels.

This is me, Sergiu. I moved to London when I was 20 and have lived here for over a decade since.

My mother tongues are Romanian and Russian — plus a strange mix of the two. English was always just the language I used at work. Over time I made friends from different countries and started using informal English more. And that’s when I noticed my resistance to sounding British. I didn’t want to sound like a native speaker — it didn’t feel like me — but part of me did want that too, just to belong more. That internal battle went on for years. I’d leave the UK for months at a time, telling myself it was for other reasons. It wasn’t. I was running from the problem.

What actually bothered me wasn’t “sounding British.” It was that I couldn’t speak English freely in the simplest situations — on the phone, with a stranger, in a normal conversation — without translating in my head first, without the fear creeping in. I’d never had that problem with Romanian or Russian. I’d spoken those freely since childhood. English was different, and for years I couldn’t explain why.

Eventually I stopped studying grammar and started doing two things every day instead: immersing myself completely in real, everyday English, and speaking out loud, alone, every single day — the same material, again and again, until it stopped feeling like performance and started feeling like me.

Within a month, my thoughts started forming in English on their own. Within three months, I stopped caring about the small mistakes — the rhythm and the feeling behind what I said mattered more than perfect grammar, and people responded to that. Within a year, the fear was just gone. Not managed. Gone. That’s the idea behind Spokn.

Everything I tried boiled down to two habits, and I think they’re the only two that matter. Full immersion — not studying English, but living inside it. Letting your ears get used to the real rhythm of how people actually talk: their pace, their pauses, their humor, what they find funny or awkward or moving. Real, everyday language, absorbed the way you’d absorb it if you’d grown up hearing it — through story, humor, conversation, entertainment. Not textbooks.

Speaking out loud, every day, without translating. This is the part almost everyone skips, because it’s the part that feels the most uncomfortable. You have to hear your own voice using the language before you can trust it. The method behind this is called TPR Storytelling — you listen to a story, you act it out with your body, you answer questions about it out loud, and you do this with the same story, repeatedly, until the words stop being something you construct and start being something that just comes out.

Spokn is built entirely around these two things. The library is where the immersion happens — stories built for real situations, not textbook dialogue. Practice is where the speaking happens — you answer out loud, you hear a natural model, you rate your own attempt, and you come back to the same lesson across days until it’s genuinely yours.

I stopped chasing “sounding native” somewhere along the way, and I think that’s the most useful thing I can pass on. Native just means someone grew up somewhere — their childhood, their school, their family, their neighborhood. That’s not something you can catch up on, and it’s not actually the goal.

What you can do is find your own voice inside the new language. Immerse yourself in it, pair that with the confidence to speak without flinching, and your personality comes through anyway — just in a new language. You don’t become someone else. You just stop hiding.

If any of this sounds familiar — the resistance, the fear of being “found out” as not fluent enough, the sense that you understand more than you can say — I built Spokn for exactly that. Not to make you sound like someone you’re not. To get you speaking freely, in your own voice, in a language that used to feel like a wall.

Spokn today: 8 live target languages, a free and continuously growing library with unlimited listening, 10 practice sessions free every month, or $45 once for unlimited sessions, for life — built on TPR Storytelling, Total Physical Response, and comprehensible input.