A ninety-day plan, made visible
See the grammar
before you read
the words.
A free ninety-day course in French, Spanish, Italian or German, built for people learning a language later in life. Fifteen minutes a day, out loud.
Colour tells you what a word does. Weight and slant tell you its gender. After a fortnight you stop looking things up, because the sentence has already told you its shape.
Je voudrais un café, [s'il vous plaît].
I would like a coffee, please.
Your languages
Greetings to a real conversation in ninety days — twelve weeks each, and the same system throughout, so what you learn about reading one carries straight into the next. What differs is what the language itself will ask of you.
French
Français
Half of it is silent. Ninety days to hear the rest.
German
Deutsch
Three genders, four cases, and a verb that waits for the end.
Italian
Italiano
What you see is what you say. The work is in the articles.
Spanish
Español
Spelled exactly as it sounds. You will be speaking in week one.
Three things this does that a word list cannot
The skeleton shows first
Green verbs and blue pronouns give you the subject-and-verb core before you have translated a single word. You read structure, then meaning.
Je m'appelle David
Gender has three cues, not one
The article, the weight of the type, and the colour all say the same thing. Redundancy is what makes it stick — and it still works printed in black and white.
la maison · le café
Mistakes look wrong
A bold article in front of a slanted noun clashes visually. You catch un maison with your eyes, before the rule has finished loading in your head.
un maison
Why this suits a later start
Nothing here is remedial. It is just built around
what actually changes.
Two channels, short sessions and an expanding schedule are good design for anyone. They matter more if you are starting at sixty than at twenty, and it is worth being specific about why — because the usual story, that languages are for the young, is the wrong way round about most of what is going on.
The part you need most is the part that holds up
Crystallised abilities — words, meanings, the things you already know — stay broadly stable with age. What declines is processing speed and working memory. A course built on vocabulary and recognition leans on the half that is not going anywhere, and keeps the load off the half that is.
This is the schedule with the evidence behind it
Retrieval practice and spacing keep working in later life — the benefits are largely preserved. And expanding gaps, rather than fixed ones, are specifically the pattern that showed an advantage. Day 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 90 is not a round number chosen for tidiness.
Chunks are one item, not three
s'il vous plaît is stored as a single unit in grey brackets, never taken apart. Working memory is the resource under most pressure, so the course spends as little of it as possible: three to five new items a day, and none at all on a day the reviews already fill.
Three cues for the same fact
The article, the weight of the type and the colour all say masculine or feminine at once. Redundant encoding is the most reliable memory aid there is, and it is exactly what you want when recall is slower — you get three chances to land on the answer rather than one.
Hearing is the sense that fades first
Audio plays slowly by default and the speed is adjustable, because auditory acuity declines earlier and faster than the rest. The listening weeks ask for the gist of a clip, not every word, which is the realistic target at any age and an honest one at seventy.
Reading it should not be work
Text scales across the whole site from one control. Every colour was darkened from the printed palette until it cleared 4.4:1 on paper, because the published set was designed for fills and reads at 2.6:1 as text. Small type in pale orange is a young designer's habit, not a decision.
On the cognitive picture: Language learning aptitude in older adults (Journal of the European Second Language Association). On the schedule: Retrieval practice and spacing effects in young and older adults (Memory & Cognition). Neither is a claim that this particular site has been tested — only that the principles it is built from have been.
Fifteen minutes,
then stop.
The daily loop from the plan, built into the site. Review what is due, meet a few new items, drill a frame out loud, log how it felt.
- 01
Warm-up review
Whatever the schedule says is due today.
- 02
New items
Three to five. Never more, however good you feel.
- 03
Syntax
One sentence frame, with the object rotated through it.
- 04
Out loud
Shadow a clip, then record yourself saying it.
- 05
Reflect
One line. What stuck, what did not.