A new look for alman.ai
Alman.ai has a new look. If you are reading this, you are already inside it.
A new landing page, with an interactive explainer
The old landing page dropped you straight into the specification, which is a bit like greeting visitors at the door with a tax form. The spec is still there (it is the whole point), but the page now opens with an interactive, scroll-driven explainer that walks you through the case for Alman step by step.
And it literally is a case. The demonstration processes Mark Twain’s 1880 complaint about the German language as an official application, exhibits and all, and works its way through the evidence, from the gender inventory and Twain’s own reform proposals to the precedent set by English (which quietly dropped its three genders about 700 years ago), before arriving at the resolution. We have also filed the full text of Twain’s essay in the blog, where it holds the distinction of being our only guest post, received 1880, processed 2026.
The specification itself is now available in three languages: English, German, and, naturally, Alman. Translating our own spec into Alman turned out to be the best stress test the grammar has ever had, but that is a story for another post.
A new logo and branding
The site is now published under the auspices of the Alman Institut für Sprachvereinfachung, whose official seal appears in the header. The design language follows suit, with form-adjacent typography, document bands, and file reference numbers. If it looks like something issued by a German authority, that is because Alman intends to be the kind of thing a German authority could one day issue. We find it helps to dress for the job you want.
Built with AI assistance
This revamp would have taken months of evenings without help. It took hours, because most of it was built in close collaboration with Claude Fable inside Cursor, on a Cursor Ultra plan graciously sponsored by Cursor. The scrollytelling explainer, the trilingual build pipeline, and the compliance linter that checks our own Alman text against our own spec were all pair-work with an AI that never got tired of German declension tables.
There is a pleasing symmetry here. A project about making language easier for humans to learn was built together with a machine that learned language from humans. Thank you, Cursor.
The mission stands
The redesign only changes the packaging. We remain adamant about the task. German should be easier to learn. Its grammatical gender system and case inflections are a tax paid by every adult learner, with interest, for no communicative benefit. That tax falls hardest on the millions of immigrants who are asked to master it while also holding down jobs, raising families, and building lives here.
Alman is our answer, a simplified German dialect that stays mutually intelligible with Standard German while removing the parts that make it needlessly hard. Easier German means faster integration, and faster integration is good for everyone in the country, including the people who never had to learn German at all, because they were born into it.
The specification is open source. The seal is official. Onward.