Welcome to Linquito

Hello. Hola. Olá. Bonjour. Ciao.

Welcome to Linquito - a new, exciting platform to help you learn some French, Spanish or English for your next trip. Whether you‘re learning for your next holiday, business trip, or just for fun. Linquito‘s a perfect place to start! And best of all it‘s free.

Each course is broken up into a series of bite-size exercises that are more like games than lessons. We use the dark powers of gamification to keep you coming back for more.

What does Linquito mean?

I decided on Linquito as the name for this project. It stands for 'lingo' i.e. a foreign language or local dialect and 'poquito' a Spanish word meaning little by little and small - together this forms Linquito! Lingo-poquito - learning a language little by little with small lessons which is exactly what Linquito strives to do.

Why did I build it? There‘s plenty of other Language learning apps

Linquito was largely built as a lockdown project to keep me busy during Covid-19. Being a web developer, I have always wanted to architect and build my own platform. I‘ve also always had a keen interest with learning languages (although I‘m not going to try and pretend I‘m any good at any of them). So I thought this would be a great opportunity to match two of my interests and learn a bunch of new technologies in the process.

Linquito is supposed to be different in that it's a fun, small project that probably won‘t (at least in its current form) make you fluent at a new language. However, it's perfect for learning some essentials if you're planning on travelling to a new country and want to learn how to introduce yourself, order food & drink and interact with the locals.

I started building Linquito in 2020 in my spare time which kept me busy during our various Lockdowns in the UK. I decided to build it using PHP & Laravel for the backend & Vue for the frontend client. I will write a much more detailed post in the future going through the exact technologies and tech stack for all those interested but don‘t worry, I won't bore the rest of you here with it!

The UX

Working alongside Craig Jenner, a very talented digital designer I know, he was able to create the simple, responsive design you see on linquito.com (and in the below example) which should hopefully provide a simple, engaging, intuitive & easy to use user experience. Checkout more of Craig‘s amazing work on his site here.