Product overview
What Verbie is
Verbie is a Dutch practice app for English speakers. It is built around short sessions — a few minutes on a tram, in a queue, or between meetings — rather than long lessons. There is no course to work through and no lesson order to follow; the customer chooses an activity and starts it immediately.
Verbie covers four kinds of practice:
- Grammar and vocabulary quizzes — multiple choice and typed answers across 12 grammar and vocabulary categories.
- Listening — a number-listening quiz where the customer types the number, price or phone number they hear.
- Speaking — "Speaker" activities that play Dutch aloud on a loop and let the customer record themselves and compare.
- Translation — a built-in Dutch ⇄ English translator with spoken playback and a saved history.
Everything is graded by CEFR level (A1–C2), and the customer chooses which levels they want to practise.
The four tabs
| Tab | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Quiz | Progress cards (level/XP, today's daily goal, Learning Review) and the grid of practice categories. This is the app's home screen. |
| Bookmarks | Everything the customer saved during practice, grouped by type, plus translations they saved for review. |
| Translate | Dutch ⇄ English translation with spoken playback and history. |
| Settings | Streak, XP, membership, speaker options, statistics, practice levels, voice, storage and About. |
What a session looks like
Quiz tab → pick a category → questions (timed) → Results screen → back to Quiz tab
The customer picks the number of questions and a time limit before choosing a category — tapping a category tile starts the session immediately. At the end they see a Results screen with their score, the XP they earned, and whether their daily goal was met.
The Speaker activities work differently: they are continuous, untimed loops the customer leaves running while walking or commuting, and they are exited with the ✕ button.
What makes Verbie distinctive
- Real recorded Dutch audio. Sentences and words are played from professionally generated recordings, not the iPhone's built-in text-to-speech, with a choice of two voices (Arjen and Ruth) and a slower 0.75× speed for difficult words.
- Speaking practice with self-comparison. The customer hears native audio, records themselves, and hears both back — the app never scores their pronunciation, it just lets them compare.
- A sizeable content library. Thousands of questions across the categories, viewable per level in Settings → Quiz Data.
- Spaced repetition that stays out of the way. Questions the customer answers are tracked quietly; a Learning Review card appears on the Quiz tab when items are due.
- Apple Watch, Siri and Shortcuts support for starting practice hands-free.
Platform requirements
- iPhone or iPad running a current version of iOS/iPadOS. The layout adapts to iPad (a wider category grid) and supports an external keyboard for the typed and number-entry quizzes.
- Apple Watch app included, but it is a companion — sessions are started on the iPhone.
- An internet connection is needed the first time each audio clip is played, for the Translate tab, and for daily goals and cloud progress backup. Quiz questions themselves are bundled in the app and work offline.
Membership at a glance
New customers get a 30-minute free preview of the whole app — every quiz and every Speaker activity, nothing withheld. Only time spent in an active practice session counts against it. After that, practice requires a monthly Verbie Membership purchased through the App Store. See 14 – Membership and billing.
For support: the preview is 30 minutes of foreground time inside a running session. Browsing menus, reading Bookmarks, and using Translate do not consume it.