· Why we exist
Most people who set out to learn a language quit somewhere in the middle. Not at the start — the first few weeks are genuinely fun, and every app is good at those. They quit later, at the point where they can order coffee but can't follow a conversation, and progress stops feeling like progress.
That plateau is a vocabulary problem wearing a confidence problem's clothes. You've learned the words a course thought you should learn, but not the words people actually use. Nekolingo was built to attack that specific gap.
· What we believe
Frequency beats coverage
A few thousand well-chosen words carry the overwhelming majority of everyday speech. We teach those first, in the order the language actually uses them.
Forgetting is data
Spaced repetition treats a wrong answer as useful information about when to ask again — not as failure.
Output beats recognition
Recognising a word on a multiple-choice screen isn't knowing it. You have to produce it, out loud, to someone.
Boredom is a bug
An app you don't open teaches you nothing. Motivation is an engineering requirement, not a nice-to-have.
· How we use AI — and how we don't
AI is genuinely good at a few things a textbook can't do: holding a patient conversation at your level, explaining why your sentence was wrong, and generating fresh practice material about topics you actually care about. We use it for those.
We don't use it to generate our core vocabulary data unchecked. Word lists, translations, and grammar are derived from frequency corpora and reviewed — because a plausible-sounding wrong translation is worse than no translation, and you'd have no way to know.
On your data
Your learning history exists to schedule your reviews. We don't sell it. The Privacy Policy spells out the specifics without the usual fog.
· The community
Software can schedule your reviews and correct your grammar. It can't be impressed that you finally understood a joke, and it can't tell you that nobody under sixty actually says the phrase your textbook taught you.
That's what the communities are for — learners and native speakers correcting each other in public, at every level. If you're new there, the Community Rules explain the culture we're protecting.
· Get in touch
We're small, and we read everything. Bug reports, feature ideas, and blunt criticism are all welcome — the last one especially.