Jiveworld

Jiveworld is a self-study method that trains your ear to understand foreign languages as they are truly spoken. Many foreign language learners hit the sound barrier when they try and use what they've studied in the real world. They can read, write, and speak, but can't seem to understand what native speakers are saying to them. They can't call customer service, listen to radio or TV, or participate in social and business situations - leaving them isolated and dependent. Our mission is to break the sound barrier to foreign-language learning. This is the second company built by Daniel Raynaud and Joseph Elliott. The first was Thumbjive started in 2004 to solve the problem of how to build mobile apps that were connected to the internet — now all mobile apps use network data, but back then almost none did. After Thumbjive was acquired they kept in contact discussing new problems they could solve in interesting ways. Both are avid indie travelers and had spent years of their lives living and working in other countries including Japan and Turkey. They had spent a lot of effort learning the local languages, and had experienced the same frustration battling with listening fluency. In 2018 they started Jiveworld to solve this, rethinking the problem from the ground up. In September 2019 they released their first product, Lupa, for ear training in Spanish. They partnered with Radio Ambulante, an NPR distributed podcast who brought the narrative style journalism of "This American Life" to native-Spanish speaking audiences. Their award-winning radio stories feature voices from all over Latin America — native speakers, speaking natively — the perfect content for Spanish learners to develop a robust ear and natural vocabulary with the Jiveworld Method. Today, Jiveworld Espanõl and Jiveworld English bring fluency through listening comprehension to English and Portuguese speakers respectively.