# Vinlingo

> Vinlingo (https://vinlingo.org) is a free, gamified language-learning web app. Pick a course, work down a skill tree of bite-sized lessons, earn XP, keep a daily streak, practise with real spaced repetition, listen to native-style audio, and climb a weekly league. Inspired by the mechanics of apps like Duolingo, with its own distinct, mascot-free identity — and an explicit commitment to honesty about how courses are made.

Vinlingo is a multi-language **marketplace**: every course is a `(source language → target language)` pair across **30 languages** — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, Vietnamese, Polish, Swedish, Indonesian, Greek, Ukrainian, Thai, Persian, Hebrew, Norwegian, Danish, Czech, Romanian, Finnish, Hungarian, and Bengali. The catalog spans **870 directed courses** covering every source→target pairing — a fully *dense, bidirectional* matrix (any language can be learned from any other), which is broader than Duolingo's English-hub course list. Each course is a full **CEFR A1→C1 curriculum** (~80–130 skills / ~1,100–1,900 exercises per pair) — about **1.28 million exercises in total**, plus grammar notes on most skills and ~8 bilingual Stories per course. All exercise content is authored offline and served from a database; the app does not call any AI API at runtime.

## Course quality labels (important, honest)
- **Reviewed** courses are built and checked by a human.
- **Beta** courses are AI-generated from a shared blueprint and community-reviewed — accurate enough to learn from, but not yet ratified by a native reviewer. They are clearly labelled "BETA" in the app, and every exercise has a 🚩 "report error" path. Non-Latin-script targets (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Greek, Ukrainian, Thai, Persian, Hebrew, Bengali) carry the most explicit native-review caveats. We label this openly rather than hide it.

## Courses live now
- All 870 directed `(source → target)` pairs among the 30 languages are live, each spanning A1→C1.
- **English → Spanish** and **English → French** are *reviewed* (and deepest).
- The remaining 868 pairs are *beta* (AI-generated, community-reviewed, clearly labelled).
- Public landing pages per course are at `/catalog/<source>-<target>` (e.g. [/catalog/en-es](https://vinlingo.org/catalog/en-es)); browse all at [/catalog](https://vinlingo.org/catalog).
- How each course is built — and why beta is labelled honestly — is at [/how-courses-are-made](https://vinlingo.org/how-courses-are-made).

## Curriculum (A1→C1)
Beyond the A1 basics (greetings, numbers, family, food, travel, daily life), courses cover A2–B2 grammar and vocabulary: verbs and tenses (present, past, present perfect, continuous, future, conditional), comparatives/superlatives, pronouns, possessives, prepositions, adverbs, negation, modals, questions, relative clauses, reported speech, passive voice, the subjunctive, connectors, and gerund/infinitive/participle forms — plus deep vocabulary (work, education, money, technology, personality, emotions, culture, society). At **C1**, courses add cleft/emphasis and inversion-fronting, concessive and participle clauses, epistemic modality and advanced aspect, discourse markers, register/formality and hedging, idioms and figurative language, collocations and phrasal/prepositional verbs, and academic/news/science vocabulary. Language-specific grammar (e.g. noun gender, the subjunctive, the imperfect) appears only for the target languages where it applies, so each course's tree fits its language.

## Exercise types
- **multiple_choice** — choose the correct translation from four options.
- **match_pairs** — match words/phrases to their meanings.
- **word_bank** — assemble a sentence by tapping word tiles.
- **translate_to_target / translate_to_source** — type the translation either direction.
- **listening_comprehension** — hear the target sentence (text-to-speech) and choose its meaning.
- **cloze** — fill in a blank in a sentence (typed, for Latin-script targets).
- **tap_complete** — fill a blank by tapping the right word from three (used for non-Latin-script targets — Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Greek, Ukrainian, Thai, Persian, Hebrew, Bengali — so no script typing is required). Right-to-left targets (Arabic, Persian, Hebrew) render correctly.

## Audio
Every target word and sentence has a 🔊 tap-to-hear button. Audio is **pre-generated** by high-quality neural TTS (ElevenLabs for the major languages plus Thai and Persian; Google Cloud TTS for the rest), stored as clips on Cloudflare R2 and served free — with the browser's built-in **Web Speech (SpeechSynthesis)** as an on-device fallback. Covers all 30 languages. Listening-comprehension exercises use the same audio.

## Core features
- **Skill tree** with crown levels (master a skill repeatedly).
- **Spaced repetition (SM-2):** a real Review/Practice mode surfacing items that are *due*, weighted by weakness. Per-skill "strength" decays over time.
- **Stories:** short bilingual dialogues per course with tap-to-reveal glosses and comprehension checks.
- **XP, streaks & hearts:** timezone-aware streaks with auto-consumed freezes and an honest, opt-in "rest day".
- **Weekly leagues:** Bronze → Diamond cohorts ranked by weekly XP. **Friends** leaderboard.
- **Grammar notes** per skill; **respect settings** (mute streak pressure, rest days); **gems** earned by learning.
- **Conversation practice** (roleplay chat) exists but is OFF by default (a paid, opt-in feature).
- Installable **PWA** + native (Capacitor) shell.

## Pages
- [Home](https://vinlingo.org/) · [Courses catalog](https://vinlingo.org/catalog) · [How courses are made](https://vinlingo.org/how-courses-are-made)
- [Sign up](https://vinlingo.org/register) · [Log in](https://vinlingo.org/login)
- Learn, Review/Practice, Stories, Leagues, Friends, Profile (require login).
- Courses teach 30 languages; the interface itself is localized into 10 (locale-prefixed URLs, e.g. `/es/…`), and exercise prompts are shown in the learner's source language for all 30.

## Notes
- Free, no ads. Tech: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, PostgreSQL. Self-hosted.
- Contact: hello@vinlingo.org