LocalPin SPRL

We believe that everyone should have access to quality language education. That's why Lingopolo (the website run by the legal entity LocalPin) aims to do for language-learning what Wikipedia has done for knowledge learning. To become the place to learn languages online. The place to learn any language. From any language. For free. You see most language systems only cover a handful of language pairs. If you speak English, and you want to learn French or German, you have a huge choice. But if you want to learn Norwegian or Persian or Thai, your options are very limited. And if you speak Persian and you want to learn English, or you speak French and you want to learn Thai, or you speak German and you want to learn Norwegian, forget it. But what Lingopolo does, is create a language-learning system which goes from any language, to any language. And notice I said to speak a foreign language. You see most language-teaching systems are writing-based and so when it comes to understanding spoken language or speaking...they’re, well, just not very good. Lingopolo though is 100% audio-based. You learn to understand and say thousands of spoken words and phrases, all in the fastest possible time using spaced-repetition. You learn through quizzes of different types targeting each of the 4 language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. You choose your own focus with themed courses on every subject from Animals to Weather. And the best bit about it, is that all these language courses are free. Free? Why? How? I spoke to David who works with refugees in Greece. They speak Persian or Arabic, but they want to learn English or German or French. They just want the chance to start again. They can’t afford paid language courses, and there are thousands of these refugees, even tens of thousands. David said to me, "Can you help?". I knew there was no way that commercially this could work; paying people to produce all these languages, and then offering them for free. This just wouldn’t be commercially viable. But I started to ask myself: “What if Lingopolo was completely free?!”. I realised that if Lingopolo was free, it would suddenly have access to thousands of existing recordings shared for non-commercial use. I realised that if Lingopolo was free, people would be willing to volunteer to add language recordings. I realised that by building Lingopolo using a model of collaboration, Lingopolo could end up as a much better system than any commercial system could possibly hope to be. By being completely free, Lingopolo could transform the world of language learning forever. This would be great, not just for refugees, and those in the world who can’t afford paid language courses, but for everyone who wants to learn a language; whether you’re a student in school, a businessman travelling, a holidaymaker or someone moving to another country. LocalPin, the legal entity behind Lingopolo, performs commercial software development in Brussels, but is also developing Lingopolo, this language-learning website, which is entirely non-profit in its aims. The legal entity LocalPin is an organisation set up to allow the founder to legally perform commercial software development in Belgium. For example, he recently spent 3 years working 4-days/week on a freelance contract in the European Commission, in DG Communications, working on the development of the new Europa website. It gives the founder, as a freelance IT contractor, both time (between contracts and whilst doing part-time contracts) and money (from the well-paid commercial daily rates) to be able to give back to the community. The key project which LocalPin has started with a non-profit motive is Lingopolo, a language-teaching website whose target audience is those who cannot afford paid language-teaching courses (in particular refugees). The aim of the Lingopolo website is to do for online language-learning, what Wikipedia has done for online knowledge-learning, to become the place to learn languages o