For teachers: teach a language from real video, or in your own words

Authentic material — news clips, interviews, film scenes, songs’ spoken intros — is the best language input there is, and the hardest to prepare. RainbowSay does the preparation live: it finds the sentence, writes it out, translates it and explains it, while you teach.

And when the material is you — your explanation, your example sentence, your story — it works from your voice instead: live captions of what you say, translated for the class, and any sentence said out loud unpacked on the projector.

Teach from a clip, sentence by sentence

Connect your Mac to the projector or share your screen, play the clip, and run a Listening session.

• The video pauses at the end of each sentence and the card shows the transcript, translation, vocabulary with readings, and grammar notes. Drag the corner grip to make the text large enough for the back row.
• Replay Original as often as the class needs. The word-by-word highlight lets everyone see which word they’re hearing.
• Take the class’s questions to the chat: “Why this verb form?”, “Give three more examples of this pattern.” The answers are saved with the sentence.
• Want to control the rhythm yourself? Turn Auto-pause off and press Space on exactly the sentence you want to discuss. See sentence detection.

A classroom that doesn’t share one language

Live Subtitles translate the same audio into several languages at once (how many depends on your plan). Give each language its own color, or pop one language out into its own window and drag it to a second display.

Teach in your own words

Not every lesson starts with a clip. Two session kinds listen to the microphone instead of the player, so your own material gets the same treatment.

Caption yourself for the class

Choose Microphone as the source for Subtitles and what you say appears on the projector as you say it: your words on the Original line, and a translation under it in each language you chose. Explain the grammar point, give the instructions for the exercise, tell the story — and the newcomer in her first weeks follows along in her own language, while everyone else sees your sentences written out in the language you teach.

• Several home languages in one room? Add a language for each (how many depends on your plan), give each its own color, or pop one out into its own window for the screen that needs it.
• Any microphone works: the laptop’s, a headset, a lapel mic — with a Noise reduction setting to match the room.
• It is just as useful outside the lesson: a parents’ evening, an open day, a staff meeting with a visiting colleague.
• The session is saved as a transcript with its translations, so your explanation becomes the handout: Copy transcript in whichever language a student needs.

Step by step: Caption your own voice.

Put a spoken sentence on the board

A Speaking session takes one sentence said out loud in the language you teach and returns it as a card: written out as it was heard, translated into the class’s language, its vocabulary glossed word by word with readings — and exactly one note.

• Say your example sentence instead of writing it on the board. The card is the board work — transcript, translation, vocabulary — and because you said it correctly, the note points out the pattern the sentence shows best. Ask the chat for three more examples of it.
• Hand the microphone to a student. The card shows what a listener would have understood, and the note names their single most important mistake with the corrected phrase. One correction at a time is kind in front of a class, and it’s the one they’ll remember.
• Use Push-to-talk, the default: nothing is heard until someone holds Space or the microphone button, so the chatter in the room stays out.
• Set the Input language to the language you teach rather than Auto-detect — it helps with short sentences — and the Output language to the one your students share. See Languages.
• Replay plays the speaker’s own voice next to the spoken translation, and every sentence is saved with its audio on the Sessions page.

Turn a lesson into material

Everything is saved on your Mac, so preparation and follow-up get easier:

• The Sessions page keeps every sentence from a lesson as a card with its audio — ready to replay next week as a warm-up or a dictation.
• A saved Subtitles session is a time-marked transcript with its translations. Copy transcript gives you text for a worksheet; Export SRT gives you subtitles for the clip.
• Preview a clip the evening before by running the session yourself: you’ll know which sentences are worth stopping on.

Speaking practice for students

In a lab or at home, students can use Speaking sessions on their own: say a sentence aloud in the language they’re learning, and get back what was heard, the translation into their own language and one correction. The practice routines make good homework. Each student signs in with their own Google account, and their history stays on their own Mac.

Good to know before class

• RainbowSay runs on a Mac (Apple Silicon, macOS 14.2 or later) and needs an internet connection during a session.
• The audio of what you play — or, with the microphone as the source, of what is said in the room — is sent to an AI service to be transcribed and translated; your saved history stays on your computer. The Privacy Policy explains this in plain words — worth a read before using it with recordings of students.
• Use material you have the right to show in class, as you would without the app.

Extra credit for teachers

Write to us from your school address and tell us what you teach; we’ll add extra free credit to your account so you can try it with a real class before choosing a plan. Details on the Pricing page.

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For creators.