Kilo Lingo

Ten languages, Esperanto and Latin among them. Graded stories built on the most useful words. Grammar on one screen. An IPA course in six English accents.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Hi I'm Mike! I built https://t.co/2J2H04csgZ to share my passion for languages.

KiloLingo helps you learn Spanish, French, Mandarin and English by word frequency so everything that you learn is actually useful.

Follow here on X for grammar tips and words of the day.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

the bit nobody mentions on day one: tones change depending on their neighbours.

你好 is written nǐ hǎo and said ní hǎo. 不 is bù until a fourth tone follows, then it's bú: 不是 bú shì. Three rules cover most of the "why did she say it differently" moments.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Mandarin tones, drawn as what your voice actually does. Get the shape wrong and you've said a different word altogether.

Flat and high. Rising. Down to the floor and back up. Falling hard.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

One syllable, five words: mā mother, má hemp, mǎ horse, mà scold, ma the question particle.

Which makes 妈妈骂马吗 a real sentence: "Is Mum telling the horse off?"

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Myth: you have to live abroad.

You don't. I know people fluent from their kitchen table and tourists who lived somewhere a decade and learned nothing. Location doesn't teach you. Reps do. Abroad just makes skipping the reps harder.

#LanguageLearning

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Word of the day: make

🇪🇸 crear
🇫🇷 rendre
🇨🇳 搞 (gǎo)
🏛️ facio
🌍 igi

Learn one word a day and that is 365 a year, which is most of a conversation.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Pick a list, play it however you like: Critical 100, the top 1,000, the top 5,000, the AQA GCSE list or up to 50 words of your own.

Seven games, and reviews follow the word round all of them, so a due word got right in the crossword counts.

Link in bio if you fancy a go.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Grammar-first teaching wastes your first year.

I sat through the subjunctive before I could order a coffee. Nobody conjugates their way to a conversation. Say broken sentences early, patch the grammar later. Confidence beats correctness at the start.

#LanguageLearning

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Ser vs estar on one screen. What something is: ser. Where it is, how it is right now, what's happened to it: estar.

The permanent vs temporary rule most of us got taught falls over at the first funeral, since "está muerto" takes estar and death is fairly permanent.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Word of the day: lead

🇪🇸 conducir
🇫🇷 conduire
🇨🇳 带 (dài)
🏛️ ago
🌍 konduki

Five languages, one word. Pick your favourite.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Word frequency is brutally lopsided.

A handful of words do most of the heavy lifting, and a long tail barely shows up. Front-load the frequent ones. 'Fortnight' can wait; 'want', 'need' and 'because' cannot.

#LanguageLearning #Vocabulary

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Word of the day: voice

🇪🇸 la voz
🇫🇷 la voix
🇨🇳 声音 (shēng yīn)
🏛️ vox
🌍 la voĉo

Say them all out loud. One will feel wrong, and that is the one to practise.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

One word, six Englishes: bath.

Southern England says it with the vowel of father, America with the vowel of cat. Scotland uses one a for both, Irish goes long and front, and Australia and South Africa go long too, which leaves the short a mostly to America

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Your accent will be bad at first.

So was everyone's. Mine was catastrophic in Madrid and I still made friends. The bad accent is not a wall, it's the doorway.

#LanguageLearning

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Where every Spanish consonant is made, on a side view of the head.

Worth a minute before you fight the rolled rr: it's the tip of the tongue fluttering on the ridge behind your top teeth. if you're feeling it in your throat, that's the French r. Different problem entirely.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Word of the day: body

🇪🇸 el cuerpo
🇫🇷 le corps
🇨🇳 身体 (shēn tǐ)
🏛️ corpus
🌍 la korpo

One of these will stick. Usually the shortest.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

You understand every word the podcast says.

Then a real human asks you the time and your brain returns a 404.

#LanguageLearning

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Word of the day: road

🇪🇸 el camino
🇫🇷 la route
🇨🇳 路 (lù)
🏛️ iter
🌍 la vojo

Same idea, five ways of saying it.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Mandarin builds words like Lego.

Computer is 电脑, literally 'electric brain'. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it: a brain that runs on electricity. Elegant, and faintly sci-fi.

#Mandarin #Chinese

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Word of the day: strange

🇪🇸 extraño
🇫🇷 bizarre
🇨🇳 奇怪 (qí guài)
🏛️ mirus
🌍 stranga

The Latin came first. The Esperanto was built on purpose. The rest just happened.

[Kilo Lingo @kilolingoapp]

Tell a Spaniard you're 'embarazada' and you're not confessing embarrassment - you've announced you're pregnant.

The word you wanted was 'avergonzada'. A slip that has made many an exchange trip memorable.

#Spanish #FalseFriends