FlashBoss now speaks German, Japanese and Spanish — and Greek Roots is out

FlashBoss since Fable

Today's update is the biggest FlashBoss has ever shipped, and this is the headline: the whole interface now runs in German, Japanese and Spanish, alongside English. The first launch asks for your language; after that, Ctrl+L switches it instantly — on any screen, at any time. Menus, lessons, boss fights, preferences, achievements, your master's own words: all of it reads in your language.

Interface language and card language can be chosen independently of each other. Where a pack offers it, you choose per pack which language its translations and notes display in — study German through Japanese while your menus stay in Spanish, if that is your idea of fun.

Greek Roots — out now

1,000 words on 1,000 cards: English vocabulary through the Greek that built science, medicine and philosophy. Learn tele-, -logy, psycho- and -graph once, and whole families of English words unlock at a stroke. Five tiers, a boss at every gate, taught entirely in English like its siblings — the fourth Roots pack, joining German, Norman and Latin Roots. Find it on Steam.

Learning German? Japanese and Spanish are in

Every one of the 3,000 cards in the German family — Core and both expansions — now carries a Japanese and a Spanish translation, with study notes to match — and the lessons now read in Japanese and Spanish too. If German through English was never your path, it doesn't have to be any more.

Esperanto Core and Toki Pona go further still: every card and every lesson, in all four languages.

The rest of the library is being built out language by language — that is what the weekly news is for.

Your English, your spelling

A new per-hero English spelling preference — American, British, or Auto, which follows your active voice — governs cards, lessons, cluster names and answer checking. The British layer covers every pack's English text, and where the two Englishes genuinely part ways (not just colour and color, but what the words mean), the cards teach your side of the Atlantic.

Also new since June

• Your settings follow your hero. Notes display and spelling are per-profile now — five heroes, five sets of preferences, synced with your save.
• Bring your own cards. Drop hand-written packs into the custom content folder — or build them in the bundled content maker — and they load at the next boot, marked as custom.
• Tier travel, in both directions. Restart at a comfortable tier or jump ahead to any installed one — lifetime stats survive the trip.
• The audio cache manager covers everything. Every installed pack can pre-render its audio from one roster, with honest progress counts.
• Ctrl+P — the HyperSpeech window. Type anything, hear it spoken in any installed language — and the window finally stays where you drag it.
• Ctrl+E — the Esperanto analyzer. Break any Esperanto word into its roots, see each piece glossed, and hear it spoken.
• Esperanto has a voice of its own. A neural voice trained for Esperanto replaces the borrowed model — and Toki Pona now speaks through it too: the right sounds, at a natural pace, for both free packs.
• Hero names in your own alphabet. Umlauts, accents and kana are all welcome, display everywhere, and your signature follows you across packs.

Faster on every machine

The speech engine now stays warm between clips instead of restarting for every one. In practice: audio that took seconds per card on older machines is now near-instant after the first clip of a session, and pre-caching whole tiers runs several times faster everywhere. If FlashBoss ever felt slow on your hardware, this update is for you. One first-clip pause per session remains — and it's on its last legs: the next update warms the engine while you're still reading the menu.

Steadier under your feet

Save reliability was hardened across the board this cycle — reviews write locally card by card, and the cloud follows without ever blocking play. Beyond that: your master's full allocation of new cards is always dealt before bonus study; hyphens and dashes are spoken the way a human would say them; lessons announce themselves once, in one voice; long notes wrap exactly as written; long cluster names can no longer break the card frame; Greek script renders correctly on Windows; and tier 9 answers to its own number again.

Coming Thursdays

From today, FlashBoss releases on Thursdays. Next Thursday: French — and it arrives speaking all four languages from day one. Wishlist it now. After that, on Thursdays of their own: Latin — a 2,000-word reading course built from the ground up — and Ancient Greek. The weekly news posts will keep the schedule honest.

And the two we owe you: in July we said the Castilian Spanish and Northern English voices would land within the month. They hit a snag. The content is finished and it remains the top priority — the voices arrive outside the Thursday line, together with English Core: the full 1,000-word English course for German, Japanese and Spanish speakers, already written in all three of those languages. No date until we're certain. Close.

Master Odiin