About LingoBlend
A reading-first approach to learning a language, and the person building it.
Nikola Artukov
Founder and developer, LingoBlend
Builds the app, writes the articles. Reachable at support@lingoblend.app.
Why LingoBlend exists
Most language apps ask you to set aside time for them. You open the app, do the lesson, close the app, and the language stays inside that box. Meanwhile the reading you actually do — articles, newsletters, book chapters, recipes — happens entirely in a language you already know.
LingoBlend was built to collapse that separation. You paste in something you were going to read anyway, choose how much of it should arrive in your target language, and read it. The words you meet are attached to a context you cared about, which is exactly the condition under which vocabulary sticks.
The idea is older than the app
The technique has a name and a date. In 1968, the linguist Robbins Burling described what he called the diglot weave: take a text in the learner’s own language and substitute target-language words into it, increasing the proportion as the learner improves. Each sentence stays comprehensible because the surrounding words carry the meaning.
That dovetails with Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, which argues that acquisition happens when you understand language slightly beyond your current level. The hard part has always been manufacturing material at exactly that level for an individual learner. A blend percentage is a direct control for it.
What the app does with the words you save
Reading alone builds recognition but leaks. Words met once and never revisited fade on roughly the curve Hermann Ebbinghaus measured in 1885. So every word you tap while reading goes into a review queue scheduled with an Anki-style SM-2 algorithm: short learning steps first, then intervals that stretch as the memory holds.
Around that sit five practice games, image associations and personal mnemonics for dual coding, pronunciation audio, and a Word Story mode that writes a story out of the words you personally saved. The goal throughout is that nothing you save is ever just a row in a list.
About the writing here
The articles on this blog are written to be useful whether or not you install anything. Where a claim comes from research, the source and year are named so you can check it. Where an estimate is genuinely uncertain — vocabulary targets especially — it is presented as a range rather than a number pretending to precision.
The app comparisons follow the same rule. Every one of them contains a paragraph explaining who the other product is genuinely better for, because a comparison that always reaches the same conclusion is not a comparison.
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