About Open Lingo

Who we are

Open Lingo is made by Trevor and Spencer. We are learners ourselves: we know some Korean and Japanese, we have Korean and Japanese friends, and we wanted to stop splitting our study between Duolingo and Anki. So we started building the app we wanted to use.

Open Lingo helps people learn languages with structured courses, spaced repetition, and letter practice.

How the courses are made

Here is how the courses are made, and where they are going.

We want Open Lingo to be free, and worth switching to from the big apps on the first day. That meant a full course in each language from the start, which two people cannot write from scratch in that time. So the courses were drafted with AI assistance, then shaped by us: what to teach and in what order, which explanations helped when we were learning, and what research on language learning says works.

Japanese vocabulary starts from the JLPT N5 list and is loosely ordered by how often words come up in everyday conversation, using the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation from NINJAL. Korean vocabulary was checked against the frequency and learner word lists from the National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원) and introduced in rough frequency order. Neither order is strict: sometimes a word comes earlier because a lesson needs it.

Over time, as money allows, we will have native speakers re-author and review the content, and the audio will be re-recorded or moved to higher-quality text-to-speech, such as ElevenLabs.

If you are a native speaker and something reads wrong, please tell us on Discord. Those reports go straight into fixes.

How we’re funded

We aim to keep core learning free. Revenue may come from optional advertising (with your consent) and, in the future, optional premium subscriptions that remove ads and support development.

We do not sell personal information.

Contact

For privacy requests, account issues, or general feedback, email support@linguiversal.com or reach us on Discord.