iOS · Russian · ages 5–7
Ask him what М says and he answers instantly. Ask him to read МА and nothing happens — he says the two sounds and waits for the word to appear. That gap has a name in Russian teaching practice: слияние, the merge. Miread trains that one thing.
From the moment he picks up the vowel, the consonant is sounding. As the two tiles close, the sound slides into the vowel. The merge is something he hears happen, not a rule he is told.
М, С, Х, Р, Ш, Л, Н come first — every one can be held for as long as the drag lasts. К, П and Т cannot: they are a single burst, and there is nothing to glide. They arrive later, once merging is already a habit.
Each syllable he builds returns after one session, then two, four, eight, sixteen. Miss it and it comes back tomorrow. He never grinds, and nothing quietly disappears.
A child who cannot read cannot be given instructions, so Miread gives none. When he hesitates, a translucent tile makes the trip he is meant to make, waits, and makes it again. There are no menus, no settings, no score, no timer, no stars — one board, one gesture, a handful of syllables per sitting.
It was built for one six-year-old in particular. Everything in it exists because he got stuck on it.
Miread has no network code at all — not analytics, not crash reporting, not an update check. There are no accounts, no ads, no third-party SDKs. What he does stays in a file on the device and is deleted with the app. The privacy policy is one page and says exactly this.
