About Kilo Lingo

Who's behind this

Hi, I'm Michael McGettrick. I studied Spanish and International Relations at university, spent my Erasmus year in Madrid, and worked the following year in Le Havre as an English assistant in a French secondary school. I have a First Class honours degree in those two subjects and I have been speaking French, Spanish and English daily across the decade since. I started this site because the gap between what adult learners actually need and what the gamified apps and travel phrasebooks deliver has gone unfixed for twenty years.

Read the articles for opinion-led pieces on adult learner methodology. The tools section has the calculators (FSI time-to-fluency, lexical similarity, travel phrase prep) and vocabulary drills.

The credentials, plainly

• First Class honours, Spanish and International Relations (UK). The degree was language-heavy: literature in Spanish, oral examinations, translation work both ways. International Relations gave the politics and history context that travel phrasebooks almost never include and that, in my view, you cannot meaningfully use a language without.
• Erasmus year in Madrid. Full academic year living in Spain, classes in Spanish, the standard immersion arc. The notebook-in-the-pocket habit (write down every unknown word, look it up on the bus, revise the next day) is the cleanest illustration of compounding I know, and I use it across this site whenever spaced repetition or language-learning method comes up.
• One year as an English assistant in Le Havre, France. Teaching English to French teenagers in a Normandy lycee under the British Council assistantship scheme, living in a French town that is not Paris. Working knowledge of French at a level the CEFR would call C1 in conversation, B2-C1 across the four skills.
• Mandarin: learner, not expert. I am open about not having lived in a Mandarin-speaking country. The Mandarin pillar on this site relies on cited research, FSI category data, and the standard structural-analysis approach. As that changes, I will update this page.
• Esperanto and Latin: built on corpora, not memoir. I make no claim to a life lived in Esperanto or, for obvious reasons, Latin. Those courses are frequency-driven: the word lists are derived from real text corpora, the grammar is checked against the standard references, and every story and exercise respects the same strict vocabulary ceilings as the rest of the site.
• British and Irish citizen. Native English speaker writing for other English speakers, with all the trade-offs and assumptions that brings.

What this site does

The site launched with phrases and articles for three languages. It now carries full courses for six: Spanish, French, Mandarin, English (for speakers of other languages), Esperanto and Latin.

• Structured courses. Chapter-by-chapter curricula built on word frequency: you learn the most useful words first, in order, with a page for every word, recorded audio, illustrations, grammar articles, and graded-reader stories written strictly within the vocabulary you have already met. The Esperanto course runs to 3,000 roots, which through the affix system covers most of the practical language.
• Travel phrase pages per scenario per language. Restaurant, hotel, airport, transport, shopping, emergency, dating, business, sightseeing. Written from actual lived experience for Spanish and French; for Mandarin, sourced and labelled as such.
• Tools, games and drills. FSI time-to-fluency estimator, lexical similarity calculator, spaced-repetition vocabulary drills, the Mandarin tone trainer, and an arcade of vocabulary games that pull from the same frequency lists as the courses.

What's free and what's paid

All of the instruction is free: every curriculum chapter, every grammar article, every story, every word page and its audio. No account is needed to learn from any of it. What sits behind the Kilo Lingo Plus subscription is the practice layer - the drills that quiz you on what the free material taught. That subscription, along with disclosed affiliate links, is what keeps the teaching side free.

Editorial principles

• Respect the language and the country. Anglocentric pronunciation guides ("say it like 'gracias'") flatten the language; sanitised "useful phrases" erase regional variation. We name the trade-offs and provide the regional notes.
• Adult learner reality. Most learners are working, busy, and not seventeen. The honest answer to "how long will this take" matters more than the motivating one.
• Evidence over hype. When I cite a method (spaced repetition, comprehensible input, output hypothesis), the citation is real and the trade-offs are named.
• No paid placements. Some links to courses, apps, or tutoring marketplaces are affiliate links and the site earns a commission. Those links are disclosed inline and never affect rankings or recommendations.

Important note

This is a language resource site, not formal language instruction. For certification (DELE, DELF, HSK, etc.), use the official testing bodies. For one-to-one tutoring, use a qualified teacher. Everything here is to help you self-direct your learning between those formal touchpoints.