Our investment in Lingumi

In the 1870s a Polish doctor created a language designed to be used globally between speakers of different languages. Zamenhof was living in Warsaw where he saw conflict between the Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish communities. He noted that one of the driving reasons for these tensions was simple miscommunication resulting from the lack of a commonly spoken language. While still at school, he considered English but quickly decided it was far too complicated to be a language of global communication. So Zamenhof created Esperanto — with a vocabulary drawn from Romance and Germanic languages, and grammatical rules with no exceptions. You can hold a conversation in Esperanto after just 50 hours of practice, compared to 360 hours for English.

The only problem is: there aren’t many people to have a conversation with. It’s a very small, but surprisingly elite, group including: former British prime minister Harold Wilson, George Soros, and William Shatner (who made an exclusively Esperanto sci-fi film). Unfortunately for Esperanto, today there is a global second language for all, which 400 million people speak as a first language, another 500 million as a fluent second language, and a further 750 million at a conversational level — English. For all of its complexities and irregular verbs, English is the world’s second language.

Learning English, or any second language, is hard — even with the like of Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, or Memrise to help. The majority of adults (and even school age children) find native fluency and pronunciation is very difficult to achieve after what linguists call the ‘critical period’. Not only are young brains open to new sounds but children of pre-school age have time to learn through play-like activities.

We are excited to announce that LocalGlobe has led a £500,000 round for Lingumi to help children around the world learn English from 2 years old. The company’s first product, Lingumi Play, is a connected toy for iOS and Android devices. Though focused on English, it supports vocabulary learning in 6 languages, including Mandarin and Spanish.

When the founders Toby and Adit first showed Lingumi to me, I was immediately captivated despite being comfortably two decades older than the target age range. The product, which uses AR technology, combines brightly coloured foam cubes used alongside an app to introduce the language. Without needing to touch my tablet’s screen, I quickly found myself saying “píngguǒ” in Mandarin (that’s “apple”). Their method to learn a language to fluency felt fresh, yet still rigorously based on the relevant academic literature.

We are thrilled to be backing Toby, Adit, and the Lingumi team. You can learn more about Lingumi Play from Toby’s fantastic two-minute video introduction here. Also, you can now order Lingumi in time for Christmas.