About Earu

Earu started as a practice tool I made for my own kid.

A lot of people learning English get stuck in the same place: they can read the subtitles but can't catch the lines; they know every word, but the moment they open their mouths, nothing comes out. Textbook recordings are slow and clean, every word read out one at a time. In real American shows, movies, and cartoons, people talk fast and run their words together, with catchphrases and jokes mixed in. That's the English kids watch every day, and it's the English they'll really need to understand someday.

So I thought: practice doesn't need a separate textbook. Just use the shows kids already love:

• Loop one sentence at a time, and if you can't make it out, play it again;
• Put the words you heard into a sentence; only getting it right counts as really understanding it;
• Read along with the original audio, and let a computer check how accurately you read;
• The next day, retest the words you didn't remember, then again a few days later, until they really stick.

The daily tasks are small: earn enough Sort points, then do Read-aloud and study the words, and you're done for the day. How many points meet the target, which sentences count as hard, how many days before a word comes back for review: all of these rules were tuned bit by bit while practicing with my kid.

Later I realized other kids, and adults who want to work on their listening, could use this too, so I turned it into a website.

The name Earu comes from the Chinese idiom 耳濡目染 (ěr rú mù rǎn): hear and see something every day, and you naturally pick it up. Say “Earu” out loud and it sounds just like 耳濡 (ěr rú), the idiom's first half.