why this exists
My niece is eight. I once showed her our listening museum of mechanical keyboards, things she had never seen and had no reason to care about. She pressed a key. It made a sound. Twenty minutes later she was still pressing, and then the questions started.
That is the whole secret, I think. Play first. Curiosity follows.
So here is the first thing you ever learned. Before reading, before writing, someone counted to ten with you, and you have known it ever since. It turns out there are 73 more ways to know it.
how it works
Tap the number. A voice says it. Press the arrow and move on. Ten numbers make a language, and every language you finish tells you one true story about itself. Danish does casual math in twenties. Japanese avoids saying four out loud. You will see.
There is a ladder too, if you are the collecting kind. It goes all the way to 73.
the honest part
Two different things here, and they are not verified to the same standard.
The written words were each checked against two separate sources before they earned a place. When the sources argued, we went with the way people actually say the numbers out loud. If you looked for Chichewa: we could not check it twice, so it is not here yet. Wrong felt worse than missing.
The voices are AI, and some of them are wrong. I ran every clip through speech recognition to check the voice said what the data said. Then I filtered the results to remove false alarms, and the filter was too blunt: it compared spellings, so it threw away real errors that were only a letter off. Welsh five is the one that caught me. The voice says pwmp, which is a machine that moves water. The number is pump. A Welsh speaker had to tell me.
So I checked all 730 clips again, properly this time. 285 of them are wrong. That is 39 in every 100.
They fail along one clean line. The voice I used officially speaks 29 of these 73 languages, and in those it gets 15 percent wrong. In the other 44 it gets 55 percent wrong, because it is reading a spelling system it was never taught and guessing with the sounds it already knows. Six languages are wrong in every single number: Assamese, Georgian, Gujarati, Irish, Malayalam and Punjabi. Nine are perfect.
A newer model does not fix it. I tried one that claims 74 languages, and one from a different company, and both made the same Welsh mistake in the same place. The answer is people, so I am going to find them.
If it says something wrong in your language, write to me at akash@sheets.works. I will fix it, or find a real person who says it right. If you would rather be that person, even better.
sources and credits
The words come from Unicode's CLDR and Omniglot, with Wiktionary as the referee. The speaker counts and the language stories come from Wikipedia and linguistics references, one source per fact, nothing invented. The type is the Baloo family and its cousins from Google Fonts. The voices are ElevenLabs. Built by sheets.works, mostly by pressing the arrow key and listening.