We’re Yak Yacker.
Language learning without all the nonsense, plus a little bit of fun sprinkled on top (and a yak).
Teachers, course designers, and builders.
A multilingual team building free lessons and tools for real people. Open a lesson and start. No account wall, no locked second chapter, no ceremony.
J.J. and Ben met nearly two decades ago while wandering Taiwan’s maze of alleys, back when both were relatively new to Asia, teaching English, learning languages, and figuring out where in the world they’d landed. Taiwan ended up sticking.
Years later, Yak Yacker grew out of that same mix of language learning, teaching, technology, curiosity, and a shared habit of asking how things could be made better.
Two co-founders. Plus the herd.
J.J. Pryor
Co-Founder & Product Head
J.J. has spent much of his career somewhere between technology, product development, writing, and building things that probably started as side projects.
He previously led product for a multinational telecommunications company, worked with startups in the IP-camera industry, and most recently worked for a leading children’s language-learning app company. Along the way, he has built apps, worked with clients, written extensively, and accumulated enough half-finished ideas to keep several lifetimes busy.
He holds a B.Com (Hons) and MBA and studied Mandarin at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.
He has spent nearly two decades abroad in a few different countries, and has explored alleyways and beaches in a couple dozen more. Along the way, he has picked up several languages as a long-term hobby, reaching B1 Spanish, B1 French, A2 German, A2 Japanese, B2 Chinese, and hopefully hasn't lost too much of his native Canadian version of English (sorry, eh)! The end result of all this work on languages, travelling, and tech companies over the years? A wee bit of a collection of strong opinions about textbooks, flashcards, language-learning apps, gamification, and anyone promising fluency in 30 days (Note: it takes at least 31 days).
Outside Yak Yacker, J.J. lifts heavy things for fun, hikes whenever possible, and thinks Taiwan is best understood somewhere between a mountain trail, a night market, and an alley you probably weren’t supposed to turn down. If he isn’t working on Yak Yacker, there’s a decent chance he’s building something nobody requested.
Benjamin Mays
Co-Founder & Language Curriculum Head
Ben has taught in Taiwan since 2008 and has spent most of that time figuring out what actually works once a lesson plan meets a real classroom.
Since 2022, he has served as a Foreign English Advisor in Chiayi City, supporting English instruction across the city’s 27 public elementary and junior high schools while continuing to teach at a public elementary school himself. His work includes teacher mentoring, curriculum development, program design, teacher training, and workshops. He holds an MA in Applied Foreign Languages / TESOL from National Yunlin University of Science and Technology.
Ben has been designing and teaching curricula long enough to have strong opinions about what learners actually need, what order they need it in, and how much educational jargon can safely be thrown overboard.
Outside the classroom, he is equally comfortable redesigning a lesson plan or rebuilding something with his hands. When he isn’t designing lessons, he can often be found flying a drone, hiking, traveling, gaming, woodworking, renovating, or playing trumpet. Years in classrooms have also left him dangerously good at saying ridiculous things with a completely straight face.
The herd behind Yak Yacker
Turns giant syllabi into steps you can actually finish on a Tuesday. She collects taxonomies the way other yaks collect salt licks, including a peer-reviewed chart of snacks. If a lesson can’t survive contact with a real evening, it doesn’t ship. Cudrey’s the reason your course has an ending, not just a beginning.
Builds the tools, names variables responsibly, and has never eaten a charging cable. Legal asked for that last sentence in writing. Off the clock he ranks espresso by “will this compile.” If Yak Cards feels simple, that’s Pixel chewing through the knots so you don’t have to.
Can identify three kinds of French R before breakfast. Silent letters remain under investigation. She gardens, listens to old chanson, and will politely send your tourist phrasebook back to pasture. The fluff is the hair. The standards are not.
Has banned fourteen robotic textbook greetings and is quietly stalking a fifteenth. Plays guitar badly on purpose and talks to shopkeepers for sport. If a line doesn’t sound like a person would say it, Paco herds it home — or out of the lesson entirely.
Can hear a vague learning objective from three rooms away. The red pen is for emotional support. She hikes, collects terrible puns, and will not let a lesson hide behind jargon. If your sentence is grazing in the wrong field, Yakqueline will yak it into place.
Explains tones without waving her arms like airport ground crew. Usually. She drinks tea, writes characters for fun, and has opinions about dumpling folds. Manda will graze a paragraph until the tones sit still — then make you say it out loud.
Keeps grammar tidy and judges verbs that wander to the end. They know what they did. Loves long walks, longer compound nouns, and a perfectly stacked dishwasher. If a rule is messy, Greta will graze it into a system you can actually use.
Makes politeness levels feel human. Still refuses to approve your anime catchphrase as a study plan. He cooks, bowls, and keeps a shrine to well-timed pauses. Yuki will yak about particles until they click — then send you to actually say them.
Our philosophy
Free means free
There are 1,678 free lessons on this site. English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, both flavors of Chinese. That’s not a typo. That’s the count. Plus Yak Cards, tests, stories, and tools. A lot of pasture.
We’re tired of ensh*ttification. You know the pattern. Free internet stuff slowly turns into paywalls, account walls, nag screens, and locked chapters. First it’s free, then it’s free with an asterisk, then it’s $9.99 a month.
This site is intended to stay free, for the most part, from now until AI takes over and rules the world. We can’t promise what our robot overlords will do with the pricing page.
That said, we’re not a charity. We like eating. So there’s a mix of ads, affiliate links, and direct support. If the site helps you, toss a few bucks our way. If not, no hard feelings.
Later we might sell one-time purchases for game skins and flair. Cosmetics, not lessons. The yak stays in the pasture either way.
Or just start a free course.
No account wall
We don’t force you to make an account to use the site. You can show up, learn stuff, and leave. No email, no password, no ‘check your inbox to confirm your existence.’ We don’t want your information. We don’t want it leaked. We don’t want any of that.
We do have to ask for cookies because of ads and GDPR. You can opt out. Plenty of people already use Adblock Plus, and we get it.
When it comes to Yak Cards, we do need somewhere to remember what you’ve learned. So we give you three options.
Option one: remember nothing. Your progress resets every visit. That kind of makes flashcards moot, but you can still try it.
Option two: save in your browser. No login needed. The catch is it dies if you clear your cache. One aggressive spring cleaning and poof, gone.
Option three: Google login. Your cards follow you across devices. We’re hoping to add Apple login later.
That’s it. Three choices, and only one of them asks for anything from you.
Want the cards to follow you around? Open Yak Cards and pick a save option.
Lesson 2 is free too
You know the trick. Lesson one is free, lesson two costs money. The first hit is always free, as they say.
We don’t do that. Lesson two is free. Lesson fifty is free. All 1,678 of them. Spanish lessons? 238, free. Japanese? 240, free. We did the math so you don’t have to.
We took a lot of time to construct them. They include games, quizzes, audio, microphone use, and a bunch of other things. We don’t want to charge for them.
Yak Cards has 88,000+ cards, with 13,000+ in English alone. Also free to use.
Some things later might cost money. Voice and AI features may cost too much for us to give away, so we may sell add-ons. We’ll always try to keep a free version, though the quality might be worse. That’s not an option yet. Stay tuned.
The point is, the core of this site isn’t a teaser. It’s the whole yak.
Lesson 1 is waiting. No asterisk.
Useful before impressive
We care more about useful than impressive. Impressive is a demo video. Useful is something you actually come back to tomorrow.
That said, four years of AI obsession made this site possible. We sacrificed our social lives for language learning, which is a joke, but also barely a joke.
Both co-founders have lived in multiple countries and speak multiple languages. We’ve worked in language learning, teaching, tech, and gaming. This isn’t our first rodeo.
We talk to experts. We make mistakes anyway. When we do, we fix them. If you spot something wrong, reach out or leave a comment. We’d rather hear it from you than ship nonsense.
No yaks were harmed in the making of this philosophy, just a lot of evenings.
If you want the method pile, how to learn a language is next door.
Teachers and builders, same room
Most companies put the teachers in one room and the builders in another. The teachers write lessons, toss them over a wall, and hope the tech people don’t mangle them.
We don’t do that. Teachers and builders work in the same room. When a teacher says ‘this lesson needs X,’ the builder says ‘I can do that by Thursday.’
It means fewer things get lost in translation. Fitting, for a language site.
It also means when something breaks, the person who built it and the person who uses it are within shouting distance. Problems get fixed fast or get yelled about loudly. Either way, stuff gets done.
What we actually make
So, why the yak?
A yak has horns. To yack is to talk. We brought the two together and gave one a teaching job — because language learning should feel like a conversation, not a waiting room. The spelling story is on Yak vs yack.
