Learning a language is an intense process, and there is an overwhelming amount of tools and resources available online. Toast is a desktop app for learning foreign languages and keeping your study life organized. Toast itself is not an all-in-one study tool, but instead a hub where you can keep track of all of your favorite language-learning resources. Toast offers a few optional lightweight study features, like SRS flashcard decks and rich text notebooks, and combines them with daily planning and external resource tracking, so the things you need to review show up on the right day and the rest stays out of your way. Everything lives on your computer. There are no accounts, and no data leaves your machine unless you choose to sync it with Toast to Go.
- Decks: Study flashcards with images and audio, reviewed on a spaced repetition schedule. Cards you know well come back less often, cards you miss come back sooner. Create 'searchable' cards that ensure you never confuse similar cards while studying, and use Toast's unique 'support' field to have things like example sentences, mnemonics, pronunciation guides, and more on each of your cards. You can also import your favorite existing Anki decks (.apkg files) and map how they should look in Toast.
- Notebooks: Take rich notes with formatting like tables, images, and audio recordings to do things like practice writing, keep a journal, or answer practice questions.
- Plans: Bring it all together and build daily study plans with todo-list items separated by core language skill (reading, speaking, grammar, etc.), track external resources, and link decks for SRS study. Each morning you get a dashboard of what's due today.
- Stats: View retention rates, study streaks, time spent, and charts of your progress over time. Stats persist even when the content it refers to is deleted, so you as the user get to decide what is included in your stats.
- Toast to Go: Carry your whole Toast (decks, notebooks, plans, and stats) between machines with one push and one pull. No account needed.
The point of Toast is to not force any features on you. Prefer another flashcard resource over Toast's decks? Skip our decks and tag it as an external resource instead. Toast is designed to keep track of all of your favorite language tools and doesn't require that you use ours.
Two deck features work together to keep study sessions clean: searchable cards and the support field.
Searchable cards appear in the similar cards panel during study. When a card comes up, Toast searches the deck for other searchable cards that share a term with it and lists them next to the card, so words that look alike or share a meaning can be compared on the spot instead of confused. Matching works on the front and back text of a card: separate terms with commas, and anything in parentheses is ignored. Cards that match the front of the studied card are listed first, followed by cards that only match the back.
Support is an optional extra field shown after you flip a card, below the back. It's the place for example sentences, mnemonics, pronunciation guides, and context notes. The similar cards panel only ever matches against a card's front and back, so anything in the support field stays out of it and an example sentence full of common words adds context to its own card without bringing unrelated cards into the panel. If you create a flipped copy of a card, both copies keep the same support.
When importing an Anki deck, you can map any of its fields to support. All fields mapped this way can't be edited after import, but you can always add additional support.
Toast to Go moves your whole Toast between machines without an account. Each install has its own ID. Push uploads everything, like decks, notebooks, plans, stats, and media, under your ID, overwriting your previous push. Pull takes an ID from another machine and replaces everything on this one with that machine's last push, so it's for moving in, not merging: whatever was on the pulling machine is erased. Toast warns you before it does this and tells you exactly what it found at that ID.
A few rules:
- Your ID is the key. Anyone who has it can read and copy your data, which is why the app masks IDs like passwords and lets you copy without revealing. Share it only with your other machines.
- Any key you pull from must run on the same or an older version of Toast. A package from a newer version is refused.
- You can't pull from the future. If a package's push date is ahead of this machine's, the pull is refused.
- You can choose what happens when Toast closes: always push, ask, or never.
Packages are stored in Cloudflare R2 behind a small Worker (see worker/), capped at 1 GB each, with rate limits on uploads. If you're building from source you can point the app at your own Worker with the TOAST_TOGO_ENDPOINT environment variable at build time, and deploy your own from the worker/ directory with npx wrangler deploy.
Download the latest version here: https://github.com/nickt573/Toast/releases/latest
Scroll down to Assets and pick the file for your computer:
| Computer | File |
|---|---|
| Mac* | Toast_x.x.x_aarch64.dmg or Toast_x.x.x_x64.dmg |
| Windows | Toast_x.x.x_x64-setup.exe |
| Linux | Toast_x.x.x_amd64.AppImage |
*Mac users: Toast isn't signed with an Apple certificate yet, so macOS will refuse to open it normally on the first launch. After attempting to launch, you must go to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Open Anyway.
Any other files that may be in the list (.sig, .tar.gz, latest.json) can be ignored.
Toast checks for updates when it starts. When a new version is out, it asks if you want to update, installs it, and restarts itself. Nothing to download manually after the first install.
Want to clone the repo and contribute? Toast is a Tauri 2 app, so you'll need Node.js and Rust installed (see the Tauri prerequisites for your platform).
git clone https://github.com/nickt573/Toast.git
cd Toast
npm install
# Run the desktop app in development with hot-reload
npm run app
# Build a release binary
npm run tauri buildnpm run app uses a separate dev identifier, so your development database and media are safe from any installed copy of Toast.
The code for Toast was planned and created by entirely me, with help from Claude Code for frontend design and backend cleanup. A special thanks to Bryana for designing the Toast icon!