The first thought abroad: "I could have done this at home."
One of the people building Talkish once studied abroad in Australia. The first thing they remember thinking, once they had settled in, was that they could have studied English just as well back in Japan.
Hours spent at a desk memorizing words were the same hours wherever that desk happened to be. If that was true, then whatever made crossing an ocean worth it wasn't on the desk at all. It was happening somewhere else entirely.
Without the other person's curiosity, it never became friendship
Abroad, they were almost always on the receiving end. Someone corrected their English, taught them a phrase they didn't know, helped them out. Generous, all of it — but it left them nothing of their own to offer back. Unless the other person was genuinely curious about them, they say, it never got as far as friendship.
The opposite happened too, in conversations with people who had come to Japan and were curious about it. Those visitors wanted to know about the country; here was someone who could tell them. Teaching and being taught changed hands again and again, and neither side was carrying the other. That was when a conversation finally became an equal exchange.
Once they had friends who shared their interests, studying stopped feeling like studying
What worked best during that time abroad wasn't the volume of study. It was the friends whose hobbies and tastes overlapped with theirs: with them, conversations kept going on their own. You're curious about the person, so you want to hear more. You have something you want to ask, so you reach for the words to ask it. Somewhere in all that talking, the English settled in unnoticed.
They barely felt like they were studying at all while they were there. They were just spending time with friends — and yet, the only thing that kept growing was what they could say. The order of things was the reverse of the usual one. You don't talk with people in order to learn English: wanting to talk to this particular person, having something you need to get across — that comes first, and the language follows, pulled along by the need for it.
Had it started out as talking in order to study English, it wouldn't have kept going the same way. There's nothing wrong with studying for a certification or a test; a goal like IELTS is a perfectly good reason. But once the language itself takes the seat marked "goal," something runs out of breath along the way.
"English that's too perfect sounds like a robot"
One line from an Australian friend has stayed with them ever since.
"English that's too perfect sounds like a robot."
Before the question of whether a sentence is correct comes the question of whose mouth it came out of. Perfection can sand that away.
They felt the same thing on a trip to Thailand. The English spoken there was nothing like textbook English. It was unmistakably alive all the same, doing real work in conversation. The message got across. People connected. That was enough.
That experience became our starting point
Talk with people who share your interests. Stay curious about them, and the conversation keeps going. Because it keeps going, studying stops feeling like studying. And language works, alive, even when it isn't perfect. Everything up to here is why we started building Talkish.
The name came from the same place. "-ish" does a lot of quiet work in English: not exactly, near enough, good enough to go on. You don't have to be perfect — there's value in simply being able to talk. In being talk-ish. That's the whole idea, and it's right there in the name.
So this is how we're building it
One part is finding someone. Just putting a name in front of you isn't enough. The conversation has to hold something for both sides, and it has to land on someone whose interests are genuinely close to yours. When that doesn't fit, a conversation dies after a single back-and-forth.
The other part is that the conversations themselves stay with you. The exchanges and corrections that happen in chat or on the timeline become review material that belongs to you alone. This part is still being figured out, and we keep refining it as we use it ourselves. Honestly, this is the one we haven't solved yet: a correction can stop a conversation dead.
And it has to be a place where people can talk without worry. Talkish is for adults 18 and over, and we're building in things like optional photo verification, with a badge for verified members, so you can keep talking without second-guessing who's on the other end.
Who we're building it for
Talkish isn't only for people whose aim is studying English. We want it to reach people who care about connecting with others — people who enjoy talking with someone for its own sake.
If you speak English, you can already reach about 1.5 billion people around the world. Learn Japanese, and a world of about 120 million more opens up — people you simply had no way of talking with before. That kind of reach is why we think of language as a means of connecting with people, rather than a subject to master.