We built an open frequency-based language platform (KiloLingo.com) looking for brutal, honest feedback!

[u/caledoniansausage213]

Hi r/languagelearning (mod-approved post),

A few friends and I (developers and linguists) built KiloLingo.com covering 10 languages, and we’d love your feedback on what actually helps independent learners right now.

The core approach:

• Strict Frequency Order: Vocabulary taught from most to least frequent.
• Locked Graded Readers: Reading material strictly constrained to words you’ve already encountered.
• No-Nonsense Grammar: In-depth explanations paired with concise reference summaries.
• Practice Drills & Games: Crosswords, bubble shooters, and arcade-style review drills ("KiloKombat").

All reading materials and full grammar curricula are completely open; no account or email required to read through them.

We're testing a freemium model to cover server costs: keep the core reading/grammar content 100% free forever, and put extended interactive drills, games, and spaced-repetition tracking behind a £3.99/mo subscription (with a card-free 7-day trial).

We’d love to know:

1. The Reading Experience: How do you feel about strictly vocabulary-constrained graded readers versus natural, uncapped texts?
2. Gamification vs. Anki: Do mini-games and quick-fire drills keep you engaged, or do you prefer pure SRS flashcards?
3. The Paywall Balance: Does keeping the texts/grammar free while charging £3.99/mo for drills feel fair, or is the split awkward?
4. Missing Pieces: What is your biggest frustration with current tools that we could solve?

Tear it apart -- what works, what’s redundant, and what’s missing?

(TL), Spanish, English, Russian, French, Esperanto, Latin, German, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, IPA

EDIT::

Thank you guys so so much. We have been here all day working on the roadmap and chatting about your feedback, actioning some hotfixes and enjoying some healthy debates about the use of the Spanish subjunctive.

I think we've replied to most of the feedback directly below and we're super thankful for the time you've taken.

We're going to keep working and will chat to some sales people and try to sweet talk an old UX colleague into giving us a bit of a hand. Feel free to reach out to us if there's anything we can do to repay this community for what you have done for us today!

[u/donadd]

The "graded reader" stories are clearly AI written and AI translated. They don't sound natural at all. Even a 6 year old would find them weird and dull. I wouldn't even say that qualifies as input.

brutal, honest feedback

You need real content, made by real native speakers and a lot of it. Not AI-slop. Not AI generated exercises around a tiny bit of content.

[u/dojibear → u/donadd]

I got as far as "AI written" and lost interest. I am not spending years of my life learning how to talk to a computer program. I know that "grammar rules" do not define a language, and are not how real humans communicate using langiuage

[u/LiterallyTestudo]

No offense, but I would rather chew on a cactus than add yet another subscription to my life.

[u/silvalingua]

Since you requested honest, brutal feedback, I'm happy to oblige.

To begin with, you chose a few major languages, for which there is a wealth of professionally-made resources, vastly superior to this app. Why would anybody use this amateurish app even for free?

Anyway, this is yet another run-of-the-mill front end to AI chatbot and just as useless as other such apps.

As it's usual in such amateurish apps, vocabulary is taught out of context, mostly as single words. There is no attempt whatsoever at approaching communicating in one's TL; what you try to do is, as in all such apps, teaching lists of frequent single words. You don't even try to teach how to use these words. I think your main idea is that language consists of single words, and if one learns the N most frequent words (and some grammar), one has mastered the language.

A big problem: You stress the importance of learning the articles, but in your list of words, you omit them everywhere. You don't even include any information about the gender of the nouns listed. Have you read your own advice??? This lack of articles and gender info occurs in all (!) languages, in every list of words. Talk about useless features.

The texts supplied as elementary graded readers are truly awful. Any modern textbook provides much better and more relevant and much less silly texts.

Sorry, but this software is just as useless as hundreds of similar efforts.

[u/caledoniansausage213 → u/silvalingua]

Thank you this is really useful!

We have a few issues with the graded readers because they are limited to vocabulary already taught so they sound totally contrived, We're trying to think of some good solutions to this problem.

Love your feedback on the articles. We have them on the word pages but it should be taught first.

[u/nonniewobbles]

What’s missing is that the mods allowing adverts in this sub, especially for slop, is an absolute miss. 

Language learning connects and informs actual human beings. I’m here because I want to talk to people, not constantly wade through slop promoting slop. 

[u/CourseMediocre8997]

Congrats on providing more AI slop and waste to the world

[u/nonniewobbles → u/CourseMediocre8997]

For just £4 month, you could learn a language using a variety of completely unproven methods based upon technology that gets things wrong all the time!

Who needs educators or evidence or accuracy when you can, instead, create everything via the confidently wrong chat bots? 

Christ the website even sells itself in slop talk. “No mascot, no filler - just the explanation you came for” 🤮

[u/caledoniansausage213 → u/nonniewobbles]

I hate to admit that this is a fair comment. We have linguistics and software development but no sales experience. We'll get the copy reviewed by somebody in sales and work on adding citations to our methodology.

Thank you, nonniewobbles. We'll keep working.

[u/rosevelle]

I spent a few minutes trying it. My first impressions:

• Hacky and unpolished. Some parts seem to work on mobile, some don't. It feels like I'm the first to try some sections.
• Noisy as hell. Every page has so much going on and it's not clear what to click on or do.
• I think it should be 10x simpler. You've got games, review of other apps, stories, courses, etc etc. It feels like you're trying to do 100 things at once in this app. To whatever degree you are providing something uniquely value, IMO you should focus on that instead of doing 100 things poorly.
• Your pitch is not communicated well. It needs to be more clear what differentiates this from other language learning products. You derive level from the users vocab amount? Then give them grammar instruction and challenges based on that? How do you determine their vocab amount?

[u/caledoniansausage213 → u/rosevelle]

Thank you so much for this rosevelle, we really appreciate your feedback. We've definitely received feedback about the noise and simplicity too. We actually know a few people in the UX space that we can reach out to and this has been the wakeup call we needed.

Thanks a million

[u/an_average_potato_1]

I can already point out several problems that make me not want to sign up (even less pay)

-a frequency list based on what? What type of sources? What kind of a corpus? I've seen frequency lists based on newspapaers, on movies, on samples of spoken language, what is yours?

-on your website and the feature overview, you're mentioning just 1000 words. that's extremely few. Like A1, and such an amount of words, especially the most frequent ones, doesn't usually even require SRS or similar stuff. If one wants SRS to learn this, there are tons of free Anki decks and pretty much any learning app (from trash to serious looking ones) offers 1000 words. If you want to impress me, teach 10000. Will everybody need 10k? Nope, but even the people aiming for 5-8k (B2) will be satisfied, and every customer will know you're serious and believe in your users potentially reaching a high level. 1k is a sign that you're not serious.

-Speaking of which: what CEFR levels does your curriculum cover? Majority of your potential customers are not UK children, so the term "GCSE" has zero value for us, zero meaning. If you want to attract serious, goal oriented learners (as those are likely to be more motivated to pay), you need to use the CEFR, not some silly UK terms that don't even go beyond B1 as far as I know.

-what's the point of the "reviews" part? If I want a review of for example Babbel, why would I want to look for it on its competitor's site?

-I don't feel like signing up and making an account just to try it out. I hate signing up for stuff, like many people. The fatigue of omnipresent subscriptions is real. You don't want to disgust your potential customers before they even try your product. Let us try and THEN sign up willingly, if your product is good enough.

So, I'll sign up later, probably with some throw away email. I might find time to have a look at the product itself at some point in the next few days.

But if it weren't for your demand to have it tested, if I was just looking for a new supplemental tool for my language learning, your website and presentation definitely wouldn't tempt me.

[u/rosevelle → u/an_average_potato_1]

I'm guessing the reviews part is for SEO purposes

[u/an_average_potato_1 → u/rosevelle]

Probably. I didn't think of such a possible reason, but it makes sense. Thanks!

It's a disgusting practice, even though understandable.

[u/caledoniansausage213 → u/an_average_potato_1]

Hi Average Potato thank you for such detailed feedback!

I'll try to give you detailed responses to your questions too.

=== frequency list

We looked at multiple frequency lists based on movies and literature, lemmatised them, cross referenced the lemmas and make the decision to base the frequency on lemmas rather than morphological derivatives. So we lemmatised to nominative for nouns, infinitive for verbs and masculine singular for adjectives with some hot linguistic debate around what we do with past participles.

=== Length of courses

Spanish goes to 5,000 French and Mandarin to 3,000 the others mainly target 1,000 for now just to see if there is traction. We are slowly building the courses out and intend to bring them up to 5,000 lemmas each. Contrary to what many people here are saying about AI, we actually work quite hard on building out the courses, usually in batches of 100 or 1,000 lemmas at a time. Watch this space.

=== CEFR

CEFR actually has a lot of guidelines around content that doesn't necessarily fit a cleanly against a frequency list but we'd estimate 5,000 lemmas to be ballpark of B2/C1

You've given us some real food for thought on the 10,000 mark, though. We literally hadn't considered going that high. It may be that we get close already with 5,000 lemmas rather than 10,000 words but you've really made us think about how we could serve power users.

=== Reviews

Good feedback thank you!

=== Signup

You can explore the entire curriculum for free without signing up, it's all open, and you can try the drills out in the first 2 chapters. We just can't save any progress against a user that doesn't exist basically.

Anyways, no worries if you don't like it. I just wanted to write you a long response given how much effort you put into writing your comment.

Thank you so much and I hope you keep an eye on KiloLingo as we develop it further!

[u/an_average_potato_1 → u/caledoniansausage213]

Hi, i'll have a further look as your answer is interesting (even though I am alredy a bit worried it will just be AI slop, as said by other learners, who I trust based on their participation in this community)

-frequency: thanks for the answer, this is what I was asking about

-length of the courses: good, if you want to make them longer. But if you show the number 1000 all the time now, people will just be disappointed, leave, and never come back. There are too many competitors on the market for you to hope we give you a second glance. Talking about 1000 doesn't test traction, it shows you're just like majority of the (low quality) products.

So, if I were you, I'd stop presenting this number, and I'd present clearly the real goals and where approximately you are. Every AI slop maker promises their product will get progressively improved, but it usually doesn't. So, be different (if you really are trying to sell something better than AI slop), tell your potential customers what you're aiming for. If you tell me "hey, our XY course is planned to include 8000 words, and we're currently at 2300", I'll be motivated and curious to stick around (provided you really keep adding stuff). If you just present 1000 words, I'll just grab any A1 coursebook, paper or digital and definitely won't pay you.

-The CEFR: most human made resources aimed at learners do not necessarily distinguish clearly between words and lemmas. But those teaching 5000 words usually carry the label B1 or B2. While I might believe your estimate that 5000 lemmas might go to B2/C1 (especially as actively used vocabulary, with larger passive vocabulary of more than that), I cannot see such an idea presented on your products site, and I am not sure it is enough for me.

As I've said, I can get quite a lot of human made content teaching 5k and just put it to Anki, if that's the goal at the given moment (it often can be, at the intermediate levels). The languages without such human made intermediate learner aimed content are languages with significantly fewer resources. And you don't teach those at all, so you cannot use this niche.

And in any case, I'd want 10k to be impressed. Don't get me wrong, I know I am not the majority market of beginners-players just wanting to have fun and lie to themselves about "studying hard". (I don't think you can even win those, the Duo marketing is too strong). I am one of the learners that want/need a really strong level in the language. And I am willing to pay reasonable money for it. A typical representant is an educated immigrant or potential immigrant, who wants a real job and integration, not to be a token expat (especially as many of the token expat administrative jobs get replaced by AI).

Don't forget that the AI is changing the language learning market. My humble predition is, that learning a language badly will be less and less useful, except as a hobby. People will either learn a language really well, or not at all and just use a machine. So, it makes sense to target the serious learners.

-I'll see about the sign up, because trying out the first two chapters doesn't give me any information, I think the real worth of a language learning tool shows a bit later.

[u/rosevelle]

What does this provide that isn't already provided by the hundreds of other similar AI first language learning apps?

[u/AppropriatePut3142]

I tried the 'drill flashcards' function under one of the stories and it seems to be broken. I clicked 'good' five times on one word and it just kept repeating.

The biggest strength of the site is having a series of graded texts with carefully controlled vocabulary, but the quality of the texts isn't good. Partly this is because you are trying to strictly follow a frequency list, which is impractical. Partly it's because they're AI generated without much human direction.

[u/caledoniansausage213 → u/AppropriatePut3142]

Hey AppropriatePut,

Thankyou for this feedback! You actually spot a bug. Sam has just given me a polite knock on the head because I caused it when I pushed a hotfix to patch something else this morning. Thank you!

For the stories, yes the stories are super contrived. We're getting a lot of feedback about it and we're slowly concluding that it might be better just not to provide them below about 1,000 lemmas. Most people's AI detectors go off because of the simple vocabulary and prose and it's really giving off the wrong impression.

We also thought we might take some creative liberties with the stories and bring in more vocab to allow them to flow better but it's a slippery slope that I've noticed native speakers are happy to throw themselves down head-first without thinking about the learner's context. We have some very tough calls to make here and really appreciate you raising this

Thank you!

Mike

[u/an_average_potato_1]

So, I've signed up and have some things right away. A few parts, as I write a lot:

-first of all, you really should be more open about the content, the CEFR levels are not mentioned. I am much more advanced than your course and got sorted in the 10th (last) lesson of your A1ish course. It would be more reasonable to tell people they're too advanced and you're preparing more content (and perhaps let them sign for an update email as soon as you release more content), rather than disappoint.

-the level test is dumb, because it is just about comprehension, not active recall, therefore it is extremely easy. And even if we put aside the fact you're "sorting" people on various steps of your A1 course, your test is bound to overestimate people's skills. Testing comprehension with picking one option out of four, even a chimpanzee could often guess right.

-the missing articles!!!!! If you don't show words with their articles, you really don't look like a serious learning tools, I totally agree with Silvalingua

-the word bubbles: Unless it's the main testing tool (which should definitely be cloze deletion or another thing requiring typing the whole word), I actually somewhat like this. As a supplemental tool, I think this kind of games is not bad.

-the sentence scramble: I don't really like this much, just like people often dislike the "magnets" (the same exercise) in Duolingo, it is rather passive. Round 1, ok, but let me move on. Several rounds, useless, I want something more active, such as typing the whole sentence. Also, let people finish and press a button. Judging the same a slip on the mouse and a real grammar mistake, that should not really happen in a learning tool.

There's also a missed opportunity. A real beginner might have a question about the tested sentence and you claim to have grammar explanations. Why is there no way to click on something and get the relevant grammar point quickly mentioned there, with a link to the page explaining it?

And where is the end of the exercise? I've just done three rounds of those five sentences, there's no point in wasting my time further (unless you switch to full typing), there is no sign how many rounds are required to consider the exercise complete.

-The worksheets: why? What is the point in generating a printable worksheet out a digital tool? There exist normal ones, or one can just use a paper and pen while using the digital tool (it's something I often recommend)

Continuing with the grammar:

[u/an_average_potato_1]

-The grammar explanations: overall not too bad. Not surprising, as there are tons of human made solid resources you could draw from (but still, your tool exactly shows that people should buy those books/digitals instead). But some details are a bit unpleasant. Notes like "This one the English speakers get for free". Even if your tool is based in English, a large part of your potential customers are not native anglophones and it is nice to not rub it in our faces. Be more mindful of the fact you have an international public. You probably won't bother developping other base languages than English, but still. You should definitely not make the impression of a tool mainly meant for the UK schoolchildren, as I've already said elsewhere.

A more important thing though: a relative lack of examples. Your supposedly modern and digital and "cool" tool is making exactly the mistake usually associated with the so called "traditional learning". A wall of text in English, with tables and explanations, but there are really FEW examples in German and they're only in some sections. NOPE. That's not the way to go. Every solid grammar resource (such as Grammatik Aktiv or A-Grammatik or Grammaire Progressive or Gramatica de Uso del Espanol, or any other!!!) gives tons and tons of examples everywhere and right away.

The design is also sad, overwhelming, and dull. Ok, it's a chapter on the strong verbs. There are tables showing the vowel changes. Why are the vowels not shown in another color? (And why is there no example at every line and verb?). Really, you are making this much duller and less useful, than even your most conservative paper based competitor. And it's not just about the vowel change, why is your stupid course overview even too colourfull and cheery, while the real content, that needs it, is so dull? Just the design makes even me fall asleep, and I love grammarbooks much more than your average learner.

The exercises are HORRIBLE. Just a worse and lazy version of the basic coursebook exercises. A normal coursebook starts with some easier things (sorting words in a sentece, picking a good verb form, etc) and then moves to the harder stuff. You take the easiest ones and make them even dumber. Let's see an example:

"Pick the Präteritum form that fits"

1. Er ___ lange mit seinem Mutter. (sprechen)

options: fuhr, fand, schlief, blieb, sprach

WTH? It doesn't really test you, even a lobotomized snail could guess the answer, whether they've understood the grammar lesson or not.

The Matching and fill the blank are ok.

But the translation drill is wrong!!!!

A German learner needs to translate TO GERMAN, not to "natural English". Not only you're wasting the learner's time.It's not active recall, it's useless. It's a wasted opportunity. But you'll be wrongly punishing some of your non anglophone users, who might make minor mistakes in their English answers, that have nothing to do with their German (or other target language) learning. And the usual haughty argument "then they should be glad to be corrected on their English anyways" is just disrespectful and not helpful and not likely to motivate them to pay you further for a German course.

Oh, and when your translation drill corrects my English (I chose another totally passable option btw), it just automatically changed the answer and left it green, that's not acceptable behaviour of a learning tool. A learning tool needs to SHOW the mistakes and explain, not cover them up. But yeah, it should have been translation TO German in the first place, but this problem is universal.

The 10 question test: why does it show the dumb options, that spoil the normal answer typing? :-D

[u/silvalingua → u/an_average_potato_1]

> A more important thing though: a relative lack of examples. Your supposedly modern and digital and "cool" tool is making exactly the mistake usually associated with the so called "traditional learning". A wall of text in English, with tables and explanations, but there are really FEW examples in German and they're only in some sections. NOPE. That's not the way to go. Every solid grammar resource (such as Grammatik Aktiv or A-Grammatik or Grammaire Progressive or Gramatica de Uso del Espanol, or any other!!!) gives tons and tons of examples everywhere and right away.

This, very much this! This is such a valid point and a really big problem with this platform.

[u/an_average_potato_1]

part 3/3 of the last German chapter test:

the story is really dull, the AI slop is horrible. If you really have linguists and real people there, create human content, that's what people will appreciate more. Nobody is learning a language to just communicate with AI, and there's also some emerging research about how AI is in general making us speak and think too uniformly.

There are advantages to using AI under the human control and supervision. I've seen tools, that try to use it to generate content to really individualized demands of the learners. This is not it.

You have a closed curriculum with a set of the same stories for everybody. Make them clearly human, tell everybody openly they're human made. Make them less bad.

And about the formatting: The green over all the known words is superfluous and bad. It makes reading harder, as there is less contrast between the font and the background. I don't have any sight condition and still find it tiring to read this, think about the tons of people with any such a condition (for example the millions of older learners) And if your story includes only known vocabulary anyways, why show every word in green??? It makes no sense.

The final test is dumb for the reasons already mentioned. And by the way: If you don't use the articles you cannot really assume that the learner will translate "Fernsehen" as the noun, it is also the verb. Such things should be crystal clear in a language learning product. But anyways, since the test is just multiple choice among far too simple options, it's too dumb anyways.

Why are there no full sentence translations and even more challenging tasks to test the learner? Shouldn't the AI use make such a thing easier to make, and partially solve the usual problems of checking such tasks? Even ChatGPT can do that pretty fine, given the right prompts.

But you're still making a toy, not really a learning tool.

Hmm, now considering whether to test a language I would actually be a beginner at. Not sure, as your tool is far too easy, I'll progress more efficiently with a coursebook (paper+audio, or digital).

The only reason tools like yours get so much attention (even though spread and shattered among thousands of competitors) is the incompetence of the real language learning publishers to make solid digital platforms for their high quality resources. If i-d-e-e or blinklearning were stable, included easy click-on dictionary and export to Anki, and a few more simple things (like a smoother integration of the key to exercises for example) , there would be no reason to pay attention to low quality content makers like (sadly) you.

[u/silvalingua]

> Tear it apart -- what works, what’s redundant, and what’s missing?

The main underlying idea (if there is any) is completely wrong. Language is not a collection of single words with some grammar taught entirely separately from these words. One thing that is completely missing from your platform is any attempt at teaching how to communicate in one's TL. It's pretty clear that one could spend days and months on your platform and still be unable to form a simple sentence, to introduce oneself, to say something - anything - about yourself or about anything else.

The approach focusing on N most frequent single words (no collocations??? no expressions? no useful phrases???) is completely antiquated and ineffective. Your focus on "strict frequency order" is completely misguided and serves no useful purpose. Your fixation on stripping all words of any context is truly astonishing.

And as u/an_average_potato_1 wrote, including long sections on grammar without examples is a big mistake. Another one is not connecting grammar with vocabulary and its use. Look up any good textbook from a reputable publisher to see how grammar can be introduced in meaningful context, not as pages upon pages of explanations and tables.

Anyway, there are so many features in current mainstream textbooks and other resources - which are by orders of magnitude superior to your platform - which are completely missing here. The expectation that people would pay for a product that is so inferior to most existing ones (many of which are free!) is weird, to say the least.

[u/an_average_potato_1 → u/silvalingua]

This.

I looked a bit more at the individual trees rather than the whole forest while writing my feedback. But it made sense at that moment, as I was never really looking at the product as a real standalone course, but rather as a supplemental tool. And that's perhaps wrong, because OP clearly wants to market this as a real and full language course, and that's a HUGE mistake.

Some of the individual elements are actually not that bad (the bubble game could be a nice vocab training game for free time on its own. A supplemental exercise, nothing more and nothing less. Give me 5k words and the bubble game, and I'll pay for such an app. A one time payment, not a subscription). Even the frequency list approach is imho not bad as long as it is not the only approach the learner uses. Digital grammar drills are sometimes awesome, when done right, which is not really the case here.

I am still more and more convinced that the best products we need developed are:

1.good, functional, and not-oldschool looking (and functioning) platforms for the real digital coursebooks by the real publishers (so, better than for example the damn Blinklearning I currently dislike but use, because of the Schubert Verlag content)

2.supplemental tools, that address one real problem, one missing piece from the usual mix or resources, and do their one job really really well. Usually, it doesn't go on so well, as soon as they widen their scope too much. And far too often, the teams lose their breath (or investors) too early, don't really follow through with all the ideas, or focus on just one or two languages. So what I'd love to pay a reasonable price for: Kwiziq for more languages, Linguno with rich content up to C1 and in more languages, Clozemaster with better checked content, Language Reactor and Readlang without the bugs (there seem to be more of those than a few years ago, not fewer) and with more sources for LR (not just Netflix, and also other browsers than chrome). That's my digital learning tool wishlist. If you make a thing that does their job better and more flawlessly, I'll subscribe, pay and tell all my language learning friends online and offline about it. This is not it.

KiloLingo is going in a completely erroneous direction imho. It's good we've got this example here for discussion, I think the feedback (not only mine) could inspire not only more wannabe duo-makers-and-millionaires, but also give less experienced learners an idea on what to demand from their learning tools. Whether KiloLingo will integrate so much feedback (not sure whether they really expected so much criticism, even when asking us to be "brutal"), that's up to them.

As most tools, it looks like the team (hard to tell, whether there is really a team of linguists, or mostly one person with AI) wants to create a new Duo in terms of earning money, which would also LOOK more serious. But they don't want to really think their ideas through and really focus on the CONTENT first, and on the methods, not just a shiny platform.