Why Kinlingua exists
The majority language will find your child. Kinlingua helps you protect the other one — on purpose, not by accident.
The problem
Most heritage languages fade out quietly, not because parents stop caring, but because nothing was protecting them — no plan, no minutes set aside, and the majority language filling every gap by default.
Kids need real, live interaction with a language — not apps or DVDs on their own — to actually speak it, not just understand it. That's a genuinely hard thing to keep up as a family, especially when only one parent (or nobody) is fully fluent, and everyday life is already full. Kinlingua turns that challenge into a daily plan sized to your actual schedule, not an aspirational one.
What Kinlingua actually does
A plan, not a curriculum
Tell it your child's age, your heritage and community languages, and who's in the house, and it builds a daily activity mix sized in minutes, not hours — something you can actually sustain.
A family audit, not a guess
Log real caregiver hours by language and see your child's actual heritage-language share of their waking hours — the gap between planned and actual is where most families lose ground without noticing.
Support for the non-fluent parent
Practice phrases for real daily moments, a spaced-repetition recall drill so they actually stick, and a plain-language guide to the sound pairs that commonly trip up a non-native ear.
Grandparents, over WhatsApp
Extended family already use WhatsApp. Kinlingua sends simple asks there instead of expecting a grandparent to learn a new app.
Raising a child in three or more languages? Trilingual and multilingual households get their own per-language breakdown, not a bilingual plan stretched to fit — see the FAQ for more.
Where this comes from
Kinlingua's plans and guidance are grounded in real sources, read directly rather than paraphrased secondhand: The Bilingual Edge by Kendall King and Alison Mackey, Second Language Acquisition (3rd ed.) by Susan Gass and Larry Selinker, and Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner. The spaced-repetition recall drill and the sound-pair practice guide come directly from Wyner's method; the daily plan structure and the family-profile framework come from King and Mackey's research on bilingual households.
No parenting product should overstate what research actually supports, so Kinlingua doesn't claim more certainty than its sources have. Where the evidence is well-established, the app says so directly. Where it's a single study or an author's own position rather than settled science, it's treated that way instead of stated as fact.
What Kinlingua won't do
- No child accounts and no child-facing interface — Kinlingua is a tool for the parent or caregiver, not something handed to your child.
- No ads, no selling your data, no affiliate revenue.
- No streaks, no scores, no red states. A day you didn't get to it is just a day, not a failure the app tracks against you.
- No paywall on the core strategy — the plan generator, daily check-in, and family audit are free for as long as you use Kinlingua.
Start with a plan, not a purchase.
No account needed — everything stays on this device until you're ready for more.
Set up your household