What makes Lingua different from Duolingo or Rosetta Stone for homeschoolers?
Duolingo is a free gamified app that builds vocabulary and recognition, but does not produce conversational fluency and has no curriculum sequencing aligned to CEFR. Rosetta Stone is immersion-only and does not explain grammar, which frustrates older learners and parents who want to understand why. Lingua is built around a CEFR progression (A1 → C2) with explicit grammar explanations for parents to co-teach, a living-books reader library (real texts, not dumbed-down content), pronunciation scoring, conversation practice with a voice AI, and optional live sessions with background-checked human tutors. You keep the academic transcript that homeschool portfolios and college applications require. Duolingo and Rosetta Stone do not produce transcripts.
Does Lingua produce transcripts or documentation for homeschool records?
Yes. Every learner has a CEFR progression log with dated assessment checkpoints, lesson attendance records, vocabulary acquisition counts, and pronunciation benchmark scores. You can export a one-page PDF transcript at any time. The transcript includes the learning standard achieved (e.g. 'CEFR B1.3 · French · as of June 2026'), the time investment, and a signed-by-tutor attestation if you use the tutor marketplace. Many homeschool families in New Jersey, California, and Texas have used this to satisfy state audit requirements and college application language credit documentation.
Which languages does Lingua support, and are all of them equally developed?
Lingua ships 60 languages. The 12 most-taught languages (French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Polish) have the full curriculum path from A1 to B2, a complete living-books library, and trained human tutors in the marketplace. Languages 13–60 (including Swahili, Tagalog, Hebrew, Greek, Czech, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, Farsi, Amharic, Catalan, Ukrainian, and more) currently have A1–A2 curriculum with AI tutor support; the human tutor marketplace for these languages is smaller. We flag depth clearly on each language's landing page.
How does the CEFR pacing work for a typical homeschool schedule?
The engine assumes 3 sessions per week of 30–45 minutes. At that pace, a motivated learner moves roughly 0.3–0.5 CEFR sub-levels per month. A1 to B1 takes approximately 18–24 months of consistent work — comparable to two years of high school language instruction, but with better retention because the practice is spaced and conversational from day one. You can compress the timeline (add more sessions) or stretch it. The engine adjusts automatically.
Our family teaches multiple children. How does family pricing work?
Lingua uses a per-family model rather than per-child. One subscription covers up to 6 learners in a single household. The engine maintains separate CEFR paths, vocabulary banks, and pronunciation profiles for each learner — a 7-year-old doing French Sprouts A0 and a 14-year-old doing Spanish B1 both run from the same family account. Additional learners beyond 6 are $5/month each. There is no per-lesson fee for AI practice; the flat rate covers unlimited AI sessions. Live tutor sessions are booked and billed separately through the tutor marketplace.
What is the living books approach and how does it work in Lingua?
The living books approach, associated with Charlotte Mason homeschool philosophy, teaches language through authentic literature — real books, newspaper excerpts, folk tales, poetry, and essays — rather than controlled basal readers. Lingua's reader library contains 1,200+ authentic texts across 60 languages, graded A1 to C2. Each text comes with: a pre-reading vocabulary preview (not a word list — a context clue walk-through), a comprehension quiz, a discussion prompt designed for parent co-reading, and a vocabulary 'harvest' that auto-adds new words to the learner's spaced-repetition deck. Parents can assign specific texts by theme (history, science, poetry, geography) to align with the rest of the curriculum.
Is there parent visibility and control?
Yes. Parents have a separate parent dashboard showing each child's CEFR level, this week's lesson completion, streak, pronunciation scores, vocabulary growth, and upcoming tutor session times. You can set daily session caps, approve or block specific content tags, require parent consent for live tutor sessions, and receive weekly digest emails. For COPPA compliance (required for children under 13), no learner under 13 can interact with external tutors or the community features without parent consent granted through the parent account.
How does the tutor marketplace work for homeschoolers?
Tutor profiles on the Lingua marketplace can show verified background-screening status, B2-or-higher language evidence (or native-speaker status), and completed Lingua onboarding. Minor-facing bookings require the verified-tutor badge before a tutor can teach children. For homeschool families, tutors can deliver individual lessons, co-op group lessons (2–8 students, lower per-child cost), and book-club style discussion sessions built around specific texts from the reader library. Tutors set their own rates; you pay them directly through Stripe Connect at Lingua's 3% fee — compared to 30–40% at other tutoring platforms.
Can we use Lingua to satisfy state language requirements for homeschool documentation?
In most US states and many countries, homeschool families are required to document equivalent instruction in world languages. Lingua's per-session logs, CEFR assessments, and transcript exports satisfy the documentation requirements in every US state we have verified (as of May 2026): California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and 38 additional states. Our compliance map at /compliance/states shows the specific documentation accepted by each state's department of education.
What devices does Lingua run on?
Lingua runs in any modern browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge) on desktop, tablet, and phone. The iOS app (iPhone + iPad) uses Apple Foundation Models for on-device AI practice — no lesson data leaves your device for the AI practice sessions, which matters to privacy-conscious families. The Android app is in development. The web app is fully responsive and works well on a Kindle Fire and Chromebook.