LinguaCue founder story: I booked a B2 German exam before I could introduce myself in German
Language reactor alternative, better than language reactor. How to learn languages fast and easy?
About two years ago I booked a Goethe B2 exam in German. Six months out.
The problem: at that point I could barely introduce myself in German.
I'm not from a wealthy country, and I always saw foreign languages as a real competitive advantage — German especially, since German-speaking economies are some of the biggest near where I live. I already spoke English, but that always felt less like an achievement and more like something you're just expected to know.
So, like every respectable beginner, I made a Duolingo account.
Fifteen days later, my streak was improving. My German wasn't.
Then Instagram, the bastard, started feeding me reels like "How I reached B2 German in TWO YEARS." I thought I had six months. I actually looked into cancelling the exam. No refunds.
Then I stumbled on Steve Kaufmann. Guy speaks something like 30 languages. I thought — if he spent two years on each one, that's 60 years of his life. What does he know that I don't?
That question sent me down a rabbit hole. Polyglot communities, Luca Lampariello, the actual science of memory, spaced repetition, how the brain forgets, how things stick. At one point I was paying for or actively using 15 different language-learning apps — each one doing one specific thing I wanted to test.
Six months later I was genuinely annoyed I hadn't booked C1 instead of B2. I started doing job interviews in German. (For context — I'm a software engineer, not someone from a humanities or linguistics background.)
The interesting part: I started applying the same principles to everything else in my life. Breaking big things into small steps. Consistency over intensity. Learning through stuff that was already useful to me instead of artificial examples. I landed the job I wanted, better pay, remote.
Then French. Then Italian. Same approach every time — B2 booked six months out, and I never once looked at the exam format while learning. I'd just show up.
What actually worked
My native language is Serbian, but almost all the content I consumed online — tech, science, chess, programming, business, podcasts — was already in English. So the strategy became stupidly simple:
Everything you currently do in English, start doing in the language you're learning.
German tech channels instead of English ones. French business podcasts. If I was reading about C++ or software design patterns, I'd look for the same content in French. Netflix, audiobooks, YouTube — all in the target language, but about things I actually cared about. I never wanted to consume "language learning content" — I wanted normal content, just in another language.
For grammar — never "today I'm studying the past perfect." Instead I'd hit a sentence I didn't understand and ask: what tense is this, why is this preposition here, how does this verb conjugate across tenses. I learned grammar exactly when I needed it. That made a massive difference.
For speaking — I actually disagree with the popular "talk to people from day one" advice. For me that was miserable — you don't know enough words, every sentence hurts. Instead I did a lot of shadowing — hear a sentence, repeat it immediately, mimic pronunciation and rhythm. Once I could actually form normal sentences, I moved to talking to strangers (Tandem, highly recommend).
The best part — killing two birds with one stone: I listened to French audiobooks about things I needed for work anyway. Learning the language and the subject at the same time.
Why I'm writing this now
At one point my setup looked like this: LingQ, Language Reactor, Mate Translate, Anki, plus a pile of tools for shadowing, grammar, vocab. About fifteen services total. I didn't mind paying — what bugged me was needing an entire ecosystem of apps just to get the setup I actually wanted.
Since I'm a programmer, I kept telling myself "I should just build this" — and, like every engineer with a side-project idea, I said that for way too long. Eventually, same as with German, I just started. Fifteen days of planning, then building it feature by feature while learning Italian, until I'd basically stopped using every other tool.
If anyone's curious what I ended up building — it's a Chrome extension that turns the internet into a language-learning environment: one-click translations, spaced repetition, shadowing, on-demand grammar explanations, bilingual books generated from real books. I'll drop the link in the comments, don't want to turn this into an ad.
I'm also thinking about writing a completely free, concrete learning plan — week by week, what to listen to, when to start speaking, how to use spaced repetition — without any "believe in yourself and immerse" fluff that doesn't actually mean anything. If there's interest, I'll write that up too.
P.S. Duolingo is still mad and disappointed at me. I never deleted it — I keep it as a reminder that I could've wasted months on it... but I only wasted 15 days.