About
About Kilo Lingo
Full courses for ten languages, travel phrases, grammar essentials, and a straight answer to how long it takes to learn a language as an adult with a job.
Designed by linguists, approved by natives and built with data.
Every course is built by people who have studied how languages are learned, and checked by native speakers for word choice, register, regional variation and whether a person would say the phrase at all. You get frequency-first vocabulary, graded readers and real audio.
The team
Michael McGettrick
Director
Michael studied Spanish and International Relations at university, spent his Erasmus year in Madrid, and worked the following year in Le Havre as an English assistant in a French secondary school. He holds a First Class honours degree in those two subjects and has kept both languages in use in the decade since, which he has spent working as a software developer. Kilo Lingo is where those two halves meet. He started it because the gap between what adult learners need and what the gamified apps and travel phrasebooks deliver has gone unfixed for twenty years, and closing it is as much an engineering problem as a teaching one.
Sergio Linares-Hernandes
Spanish Language Consultant
Advises on the Spanish curriculum: word choice, regional variation and whether a native speaker would phrase it that way.
Wee Khang Lin
Mandarin Language Consultant and QA
Advises on the Mandarin curriculum: character choice, tone and register, and the constructions a learner will meet in real use. Also runs quality assurance across the site, on the courses and on the software that delivers them.
Jairo Kasmierchcki
Portuguese Language Consultant
Advises on the Portuguese curriculum: word choice, the Brazilian and European split, and whether a sentence sounds like something a Brazilian would say.
Stanislav Dreiling
Russian Language Consultant
Advises on the Russian curriculum: word choice, stress and case endings, and whether a sentence sounds natural.
Jonathan Elphick
Fractional Customer Success Manager
Looks after learners: the questions that come in, what people get stuck on, and making sure the answer arrives from a person.
We are looking for Esperanto and Latin speakers
The Esperanto course runs to 3,000 roots and the Latin course keeps growing, and we are expanding both. We want experienced speakers and readers to join the team and help curate them: to sharpen the word lists against real usage, to catch a story that reads as translated, and to say what a learner ought to meet earlier than we teach it today.
If that is you, write to jon@kilolingo.com.
Which languages we speak, and which we advise on
Worth saying plainly, because most language sites do not. Spanish and French are Michael's own, studied and lived in. Mandarin is advised on by Wee Khang Lin, Spanish is checked by Sergio Linares-Hernandes, Portuguese by Jairo Kasmierchcki and Russian by Stanislav Dreiling, which is what the line at the top of this page rests on. Esperanto and Latin are built the same way as everything else, frequency-first word lists with the grammar checked against the standard references, but no native speaker has signed them off and so we do not claim one. That is why those two courses drop the middle clause of our own strapline, and why we are recruiting for them above.
The method behind the courses is drawn primarily from Michael's own experience of learning and teaching languages, across four languages and three countries, with input from the rest of the team and from native speakers. For the method itself (frequency-first vocabulary, graded readers, the vocabulary ceilings and how the word lists are built), see how Kilo Lingo works.
What this site does
The site launched with phrases and articles for three languages. It now carries full courses for ten: Spanish, French, Mandarin, English, Esperanto, Latin, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. The English one is for speakers of other languages.
- 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 and every word page. No account is needed to read any of it. The Kilo Lingo Plus subscription adds the practice: the drills that quiz you on what the free material taught, plus audio beyond the first two chapters, printables and the daily emails. 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. A realistic answer to "how long will this take" matters more than a motivating one.
- Evidence over hype. When we cite a method (spaced repetition, comprehensible input, output hypothesis), the citation is real and the trade-offs are named.
- Say who wrote it and what we do not know. Where a language is outside our lived experience we say so on this page rather than letting the marketing imply otherwise.
- 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.
Get in touch
One inbox, hello@kilolingo.com, and a person reads it. The contact page covers billing, cancelling, reporting a wrong answer and who we are legally.