When Toby Mather travelled to Russia in 2013 to teach English to primary school children, it was made clear that the school expected results – and fast. But that expectation didn’t match up to the realities of teaching. “Even when you get a really great, passionate teacher, you can’t turn 30 children in a room into great English speakers with just one hour a week. And you especially can’t do it if they’re starting at the age of seven,” he says.
The experience inspired Mather to do two things. First, to further indulge his passion and talent for teaching, and second, to give children a foundation in English before they even step into a classroom. “There is a huge drop in a child’s capacity to acquire a second language when they hit six years of age,” he says. “I thought it was a massive shame that they are not starting at the age of, say, four.” But, he needed a solution that was affordable, easy to use, and could be done at home without a private language tutor.
When he returned to London, Mather met Adit Trivedi at tech accelerator Entrepreneur First. In 2015, they came up with the idea for Lingumi, an English language learning platform for pre-schoolers, that is now used by more than 10,000 families in 50 countries.
In development, the platform has gone through dozens of iterations, starting with physical products such as cubes with characters on the sides
Learning English is a long journey for anyone – even native speakers take years to become what Mather describes as “professional”. But children, whose brains are like sponges until they are about six years old, have the ability to pick up a second language – and the confidence to speak it – as if it was their first.
Trivedi knows this first-hand – growing up in a non-native English-speaking home, he learned to speak both Gujarati and English. Throughout his life, years would go by when he would speak only English but it would take just hours of being immersed in Gujarati for him to be speaking it conversationally again. Both Trivedi and Mather’s personal insights into how children learn and the impact this can have on them later in life have been a key influence in the development of Lingumi as a platform.
Lingumi learning is based on an app, which allows toddlers and their parents to participate in a single 20-minute lesson per day. The children are encouraged to learn natural, spoken English with their parent (rather than reading or writing), where single words are gradually built upon to create more complex phrases over the course of the curriculum.
A particular challenge of building the platform has been making sure it’s suitable for its target audience – pre-school-age kids. “How do you resonate language goals in your app to a two- or three-year-old? How do you build something that’s truly fun and engaging, but inevitably and fundamentally teaches English?” says Trivedi.
One of the things the pair have kept in mind is that they’re not building a tool for children to become completely fluent in English. Rather, they’re aiming to give them a foundation for when they do start learning the language at school. Mather says giving children these tools can have lifelong benefits.
“We know that a fluent English speaker in a non-native English-speaking country can earn 50% more than a non-fluent English speaker,” he says. “I’m in China now and I see very starkly the English speakers who I meet through work or through personal life are the ones in the best jobs, earning the most money, the ones who can travel.”
To get the platform to this point, Mather and Trivedi have gone through dozens of iterations, starting with physical products that could be used alongside the app – including a toy cube with characters on each side, who corresponded to the app’s games.
“We would even go as far as going to Hyde Park Winter Wonderland for five days straight and literally hustle customers to try and test these products,” says Trivedi. But, in order to integrate voice detection, recording games, and more complex grammar systems, the pair made the difficult decision to abandon the toy and move to a digital-first approach. “It was a bit like using the paint program on an old Windows computer and trying to draw the Mona Lisa,” says Mather.
Despite not promising to make children fluent English speakers, Lingumi’s founders are confident they’re well ahead of other tutor-free language-learning platforms for children. “The most anyone has been able to achieve is maybe getting people 5% of the way there,” says Mather, referring to platforms in which the curriculum focuses on singing, videos and entertainment.
The results for Mather and Trivedi, however, have been even better than expected. “I couldn’t believe how early they started saying words and how native their accents sounded,” says Mather.
They both have big ambitions for Lingumi. “It has the technology, the price points, and the value to get to a billion customers,” says Trivedi. While most of the 10,000 to 15,000 users a month are located within Germany, Italy and Taiwan, the next step is pushing Lingumi to the Chinese market. “We’re seeing a spread into new countries: China, France, Spain, South America,” says Trivedi. “Our aim is to create the biggest pre-school education company in the world.”
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