Introducing the new Lingumi Curriculum

Hello! My name is Dr Dara Jokilehto. I have a Doctorate in Linguistics, and, since December, am Lingumi’s Head of Curriculum. My job at Lingumi is to help your child learn English effectively, using the Lingumi Method and app.

I discovered Lingumi while working as a researcher at the University of Potsdam, after finishing my PhD. I fell in love with the Lingumi mission: to make learning English effective, affordable, and fun for every child. I am also a proud dad of a 2-year-old boy, and know the importance of introducing our children to their second language early.

In this blogpost, I’m going to:

• Predict how much your child will learn with Lingumi
• Tell you how our new Curriculum works
• Introduce our new ‘Language Goals’
  

If we succeed in our mission, your child will be a confident young English speaker before they reach their first school classroom. And they shouldn’t wait; creating an early foundation in English during the ‘critical period’ of 2-6 years old is a huge advantage. The good news is: you and your child can do it easily, at low cost, and it’ll be fun!

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Our New Curriculum

The aim of the Lingumi Method and Curriculum is to get your child to a foundation level in English before they reach their first classroom. Until now, our curriculum has been a ‘black box’ - you could play daily lessons, but didn’t know what was coming up, how many words your child would learn, and what to expect from your child after 3, 6, and 12 months.

With the new Curriculum, we’re changing that. The Curriculum is made up of:

• Lessons: every day we open a new one. Each lesson takes about 10 minutes, and contains 4-6 fun learning games. Each game uses words from our word sets.
• Word Sets: these groups of 20-25 new nouns, verbs, and adjectives, learned over 5-6 lessons, during which time your child will accomplish 1-3 language goals.
• Language Goals: we’ve broken down early English into easy to understand ‘goals’, so you can understand what your child is learning now and next.‍

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‍How much will my child learn?

Every child learns at a different pace, but I wanted to give some general milestones. The average Lingumi family plays 2-3 lessons a week. At that pace, your child will be able to do the following:

• One week: remember and understand 16-20 words, and have begun their first 3-4 language goals;
• Five weeks: understand and pronounce a full English sentence with a Subject, a Verb, and an Object;
• Three months: your child will have an active vocabulary of more than 120 words and structures, have completed more than 15 language goals, and they’ll have measurably improved their English accent;
• One year: your child’s vocabulary will be about 1000 items (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and structures) and they’ll love answering, and maybe even asking questions, and understanding complex sentences, in English. They’ll have completed more than half of the language goals.
  

So, what are Language Goals?

Our new Language Goals are linguistic topics that your child is learning with Lingumi. We divide them into three categories: Understand, Grammar, and Speak. Each type is designed to teach a different linguistic category, like ‘speaking’ for ‘Speak’ Goals.

Each goal has a title, an example, and a description on our new Curriculum Webpage.

For example

• “Understand: where questions” Your child can understand simple ‘where’ questions.
• “Speak: Clothes” Your child can say the names of common items of clothing.
• “Grammar: Like and Don’t Like” Your child can understand phrases expressing preference (like/love).
  

There are nearly 100 of these goals, and we add to the list occasionally as we do more research. Over time, your child will reach every goal. Some goals can be reached within a few lessons, some might take many more lessons to fully complete.

With these goals, you and your child will be learning English in a more structured way. It’s still fun, but at the end of it, they won’t just know individual words - they’ll really understand the language, and be able to speak it.

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What are Word Sets?

Today, we’re also launching one type of goal that parents have asked for: Word Sets! These are groups of 25-30 words for your child to learn through playing their Lingumi lessons. With each set, we include 1-2 new grammatical rules, which means that your child’s ability to speak English will improve with every set.

We will teach your child a new word set every 5-6 lessons. This means your child can learn a whole word set in 5-10 days, if you play regularly.

For example, Word Set 1 teaches words such as apple, nose, and car, but also how to ask yes/no questions. In Word Set 4, on the other hand, your child learn words such as spaghetti, sun, and dance, but also how to form the present continuous tense (e.g., Yum is dancing).

And don’t worry - this stuff isn’t difficult. Your child will learn words and structures just by playing - that’s the magic of your child’s brain, compared to yours or mine.

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To help you and your child, we’re also adding progress tracking so you can see how far your child has got, and AI voice recording analysis, so we can give better feedback to your child in ‘Speak’ games. You’ll find those in the app very soon, if not already!.

That’s all you need to know to get started with Lingumi. I can’t wait to hear how your child is progressing after the first few months. You can begin, for free, today: sign up here.

Yours faithfully,

Dr Dara

P.s. Do you want to know more about the science behind what I’m working on? You can write to us at support@lingumi.com, and I’ll personally reply to you.