Your first week, free

There are three states a Lingara user can be in — not signed in, signed in on the free plan, and subscribed to Plus — and a new account passes through all three in its first week, because signing up starts a trial. This page is what each of them actually gives you, and what happens when the trial ends.

You can use Lingara without an account, and the honest version of what that gets you is: the vocabulary page works, and almost nothing is kept.

Open the web app, pick a language and a level, and it will generate a vocabulary list. No email address, no password, nothing to cancel. The level ceiling without an account is 3, and you can generate up to three lesson plans in total — a lifetime allowance, not a daily one. Flashcards are not available, and there is no AI tutor.

Nothing you do in this state survives. There is no account to attach progress to, so the words you generated are gone when you close the tab. That is the trade, and for the thing this state is for — finding out within two minutes whether the app is any good — it is the right one.

Signing up

Creating an account takes one step: Google, Apple, or an email address and a password. No card is asked for, at signup or at any point during the week that follows.

Two things happen at once. The first is that everything starts being kept: words, flashcards, progress, per-language, across devices. The second is that your 7-day Plus trial starts, from the moment the account is created.

It is worth being clear about the trial’s shape, because “free trial” usually means something else. There is no card on file, so there is nothing to cancel, nothing that begins charging on day eight, and no reminder email you have to act on. The week expires and the account continues on the free plan. If you do nothing at all, nothing is taken.

What the week gives you

During the trial you have Plus, which means:

5 lesson plans a day, rather than one.
All nine levels, rather than the first four.
The AI tutor — ask questions about the words and sentences in front of you, in your own language.
No ads.

Flashcards are available on the free plan too, so they are not a trial feature; they are simply something a guest cannot have because a guest has nowhere to store them.

The useful way to spend the week is not to hoard plans. Five a day for seven days is thirty-five lesson plans, which is far more material than anyone reviews properly, and the flashcards they generate will all come due at once. Generate one or two a day, work them through, and spend the rest of the week actually reviewing — the point of the trial is to find out whether the loop suits you, and the loop is the reviewing.

Do use the tutor, because it is the feature hardest to evaluate from a description and the one that disappears on day eight. Ask it about a word you have got wrong three times. Ask it why a sentence is built the way it is.

Day eight

The trial ends and nothing is deleted and nothing is locked away. Your flashcards, your saved words and your progress stay exactly as they are. What changes is the ceiling:

1 lesson plan a day instead of five.
Levels 1 to 4 instead of 1 to 9.
Flashcards, unchanged — the full deck, the full scheduler, no limit.
No AI tutor.
Ads, described below.

The important half of that list is the third line. The free plan keeps the entire review system: every card you made, its ease factor, its interval, its next review date. The part of Lingara that is most of the daily work and most of the actual learning is not behind the subscription. What the subscription buys is new material faster, harder material, and someone to ask.

One lesson plan a day is also not as little as it sounds, if you are reviewing properly. A plan generates a set of new cards, and a set of new cards generates a fortnight of review obligations — see how reviews are scheduled. Most learners on the free plan are limited by review time long before they are limited by plan count.

About the ads

Free accounts see ads, and here is exactly where.

They appear after a finished exercise set, a finished lesson plan or a finished flashcard review, and on the website below your vocabulary results. There is an optional rewarded video you can choose to watch. That is the list.

An ad is never shown while you are answering an exercise or talking to the tutor. This is a rule about where ad slots are allowed to exist, not a preference — the middle of a learning task is the one place an interruption costs something that cannot be recovered. Plus subscribers see no ads at all, and because no ad is requested for them, nothing is sent to select one.

In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, a consent form appears before the first ad and decides whether an ad may be requested at all. You can change that choice later, and separately turn off personalised ads in the app’s privacy settings. The full account of what is sent, to whom, and what each control does is on the privacy policy.

Prices and the current comparison live on the pricing page, which is the single place those numbers are maintained, and the trial and plans page in the docs covers billing, cancelling and refunds in detail. Two things are worth repeating here because people get caught by them:

Where you subscribe decides who bills you. On iOS that is Apple, through your Apple ID. On Android and the web it is by card, through Stripe.

An App Store subscription is not cancelled by deleting your Lingara account. Apple does not permit us to cancel it for you. Cancel it in your Apple ID subscription settings first, then delete the account. A card subscription is cancelled automatically when the account goes.

A realistic first week

Day one: generate a vocabulary list without signing in and see whether the language and level feel right. Sign up. Generate one lesson plan and finish it.

Days two to six: review the cards that are due — it will be a few minutes — and generate one more plan when the previous one’s words have stopped feeling new. Ask the tutor about the two or three words you keep failing.

Day seven: do a review session and notice how many cards are not due. That number is the system working, and it is the thing to judge Lingara on. The subscription question is only worth asking after it.