How My Linguagraph^® works

Every language you already speak is scored across 100 grammatical features: the building blocks of how a language orders its words, marks gender, handles tense, and builds sentences. When you choose a target language, My Linguagraph® compares your languages against it feature by feature and shows two things: where they line up, and where they pull against each other. The result is a map of what you already know and what will actually take work.

Some source languages hand you the target almost for free. A Spanish speaker learning Italian starts well ahead: the two share around 82% of their core vocabulary (lexical-similarity estimate), both mark nouns as masculine or feminine, and their tense and mood systems line up almost one to one. Most of what looks new is already familiar under a thin accent. My Linguagraph® marks these features as positive influence, the ones where your existing grammar transfers straight across.

Closeness is not the whole story. A language can share vocabulary and still trip you on structure. A French speaker learning German meets three obstacles at once: French keeps the verb in second position, while German sends it to the end of subordinate clauses; German runs on four grammatical cases, and French lost its case system entirely, so there is nothing to carry over; and the genders often disagree, la lune is feminine in French, der Mond is masculine in German. These are the features My Linguagraph® flags as negative influence, or interference: places where an instinct from one language quietly steers you wrong in another.

The feature set is drawn from the standard typological records and reference grammars, not from guesswork. 100 features are live in the scoring engine. Each one is a specific, checkable property (word order, case, gender, tense depth, article system, and so on), which is why the comparison is concrete rather than a vague sense that two languages are alike.

Open the widget preview and look at your own profile before you commit to a target. You will see how many of the 100 features you already recognize and where the interference sits. Speak three languages, and you usually start at 30 or more. The fastest start is the target with the most positive influence and the least interference: it puts you closest to fluent and gives the languages you already speak the most to do. My Linguagraph® does not make a language easier. It shows you which of the languages you already speak is quietly doing the teaching.