Introducing blas.

Blas is a language learning app for Celtic languages — Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic. It's built for adult learners who want to go beyond basic vocabulary and actually understand how the grammar works.

The name means "taste" in Irish. The idea is to give people a real taste of the language rather than a surface-level gamified experience that never quite gets you to fluency.

Why Celtic languages

Duolingo offers Irish and Welsh courses, but they leave a lot of gaps — limited grammar explanations, synthetic audio, and almost nothing for intermediate or advanced learners. These are languages with rich morphology and mutation systems that deserve tools built specifically for them, not adapted from a framework designed for Spanish.

We use native audio from ABAIR.ie for Irish and techiaith.cymru for Welsh, so learners hear the language as it's actually spoken. Grammar isn't hidden behind pattern matching — it's explained directly, with context.

How it's built

The app runs on Kotlin Multiplatform for shared logic across iOS, Android, and web. The drill engine uses FSRS spaced repetition scheduling, and everything works offline — content is bundled as static JSON so core practice doesn't need a network connection.

iOS uses SwiftUI, Android uses Jetpack Compose, and the web version runs on Next.js. The backend is Supabase handling auth, storage, and sync.

Where it's at

The content pipeline currently covers around 500 validated sentences each for Irish and Welsh, with a comprehensive validation system running 22 structural and semantic checks. The focus right now is on getting the core learning experience right before scaling content further.