FAQ
Everything below is the whole product, with no limit on how much you use it. No subscription, no trial, no daily cap, no card and no paid tier — so nothing here describes something you would have to buy, or something you would run out of.
Yes — all of it. No subscription, no free trial that expires, no credit card, no paywall on any feature, no ads, no locked languages or levels, and no daily limit on how long you practice. There is no paid tier to upgrade to.
There isn't one. The content is already built — the lessons are written, the audio is recorded, and serving it costs us almost nothing. There is no upsell because there is nothing left to sell you. Wekos used to have a paid tier; we made it free and kept every feature in it.
Duolingo funds a very large company with ads and subscriptions. Wekos is small, the course content is already finished, and hosting audio is cheap. We would rather have people actually using it than run a conversion funnel. The free version is the whole version — there is no Wekos Plus.
No. You never enter payment details anywhere in Wekos, because there is nothing to pay for. Signing up takes an email address.
No. There is no daily cap, no hearts to run out, no energy bar and no cooldown. Practice for ten minutes or three hours, every day, and nothing stops you or asks you to upgrade. Wekos used to cap free sessions at five minutes — that limit is gone for everyone.
Everything: all 8 languages, every sentence category, native audio in both a male and a female voice, all three practice modes, adjustable repetitions, sequenced course progression, built-in spaced repetition, the vocabulary library, generation-matched slang cards, grammar explanations, streak tracking, the interactive tone guide for Mandarin and Cantonese, and the particle guide for Japanese.
There are no plans to, and there is no paid tier in the product to switch on. If that ever changed we would say so clearly rather than quietly gating features you already use.
No. There are no ads anywhere in the app, no sponsored lessons and no interstitials between sessions. Nothing in Wekos is funded by showing you something.
No. Signing up takes an email address. Your progress is stored so it follows you between devices, and that is what it is used for. Speaking practice runs on your own device and no audio ever reaches us. The conversation partner also runs on your device, so nothing you say to it leaves your phone.
Yes. Every language is a sequenced course, not a pile of disconnected drills. Categories are ordered so each session builds on the last — greetings through real conversation. Wekos saves your place when you leave, and review sessions pull the items you are actually due for. You always know what to do next.
Nobody becomes conversational by memorizing a list of fruit names. Wekos starts with real phrases people actually say — not arbitrary category lists. Each session drills the individual words, then the semantic chunks, then the full sentence. You absorb grammar naturally by seeing it in context, the same way you learned your first language.
Auto plays through everything hands-free — good for commuting or background listening. Semi-manual loops the current word or sentence until you're ready to move on. Manual gives you full control over every individual repetition. You can switch between them at any time.
Each of the sixteen units is built around a grammar step rather than a theme — present tense, the preterite, the subjunctive — so the order is the teaching method rather than a filing system. A unit carries its vocabulary sets, a sentence drill, a story and a quiz, and the quiz decides whether you move on.
Sixteen units per language, running from greetings to debating an opinion. How long that takes is up to you: there is no daily cap, no cooldown and nothing that stops you doing four units in a weekend or one a month.
Yes. A short placement test puts you in at the right unit, and you can decline it and start at unit one instead.
You come back to the card you left, not to the start. That applies to sentence drills, vocabulary sets and stories.
Twelve questions at the end of a unit, graded on the server rather than on your device, and deliberately carrying items from earlier units. Passing means it stuck rather than that you finished the unit this afternoon.
Repetition is the drill: each item repeats so the form has a chance to settle rather than being recognized once and forgotten. Seven times by default, and you can set it anywhere from two to fifteen.
Words come back on a schedule set by how well you knew them last time, so what you find hard comes round more often than what you do not. You never have to decide what to practice.
There is a second review mode that ignores the schedule entirely and goes at whatever keeps catching you out, weighted toward the question formats you are weakest in. It is the only thing that has anything to offer a learner who has finished everything.
Five: recognizing a word, recalling it, hearing it, spelling it, and saying it out loud. Your score in each is tracked separately, and those scores already steer which exercises mistakes practice serves you.
After every sentence block, a slang card introduces one piece of vocabulary you won't find in a textbook — regional slang, colloquial phrases, internet language. It's calibrated to your generation (set at signup, adjustable in settings) and labeled with regional origin where relevant, like Mexican Spanish vs. Rioplatense Spanish.
Yes — the library holds every word you have actually learned, searchable, with the regional note and the slang you picked up alongside it.
On the cards that ask you to say a word out loud, yes — using your own device's speech recognition. Wekos never receives or stores any audio, only the text your device hands back. The score is whether you were understood, not whether you sound native: a transcript can catch a word said wrongly enough to become a different word, and it cannot tell a clear foreign accent from a perfect one. In Mandarin and Cantonese that does include a wrong tone, because a wrong tone is a different word.
Every word and sentence is recorded in both a male and a female voice. You pick one and hear it throughout, and you can slow it down until you can hear where one word ends and the next begins.
Yes, line by line, and in character — a man’s lines in the male voice and a woman’s in the female, rather than one voice reading both halves of a conversation.
Eight everyday scenarios — ordering a coffee, asking the way, a doctor's appointment, a job interview — with a character who stays in character, speaks only the language you are learning, and will not correct you mid-conversation. When you have done what you came to do, the scene ends and you get three lines of feedback in English quoting what you actually wrote. It runs on your own device rather than in the cloud, so nothing you say leaves your phone, it costs nothing to run, and it works with no signal. It needs a recent phone: iOS 26 with Apple Intelligence, Android 14 with Gemini Nano, or a browser with a built-in model. The app checks and tells you.
No, and it never will, because it does not run on our servers. It runs on your own device, which is also why nothing you say to it leaves your phone and why it works with no signal.
The app checks and tells you plainly rather than failing quietly. Everything else works regardless — the conversation partner is the one feature with a hardware floor.
For Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian there is a full conjugation engine — every tense of any verb, worked out on your device from real rules rather than looked up in a table. Irregular forms are colored, the stem and the ending are drawn in different weights so you can see what changes, and there is a drill that pulls three-quarters of its questions from the irregular forms. It works offline.
No. It only asks for tenses your units have already taught, so nobody two units into Spanish is asked for an imperfect subjunctive. There is also a hint that shows the verb’s tables over the question, and nothing is deducted for using it — the drill is not scored.
Both. The prompt says "you all", which is vosotros in Spain and ustedes across Latin America, and the courses teach Latin American Spanish. Either answer is correct, and if you miss it the app shows you both.
Tones are the hardest part of Mandarin and Cantonese for most learners. Wekos has an interactive tone visualizer — an audio pitch graph you can listen to and reference at any point during a session. You see the shape of the tone and hear it simultaneously. Mandarin has 4 tones; Cantonese has 6.
Grammar particles (は, が, の in Japanese; 了, 的 in Mandarin/Cantonese) are notoriously confusing and most apps either skip them or explain them poorly. Wekos includes a full particle reference — every particle with example sentences and audio — available any time during a session when something doesn't make sense.
Mandarin and Cantonese count nouns with a classifier — a measure word between the number and the thing, the way English says two sheets of paper rather than two papers. You say 一個蘋果, never 一蘋果, and which classifier a noun takes has to be learned with the noun. Wekos shows it in front of every countable noun it teaches, and you can tap it to see what that particular one is for. This is the detail most courses postpone and most free apps never cover at all.
No. Pinyin, jyutping and romaji sit alongside the characters rather than instead of them, including on every quiz option — so a question tests whether you know the word, not whether you can already read the script. The characters are there from the first session, next to something you can read.
Yes, but after you have already met the pattern in a real sentence rather than as a lecture beforehand, with live conjugation tables beside the explanation where the language has them.
You can issue yourself a record at A1, A2 and B1 as an Open Badge, which anyone you send it to can verify. We are straightforward about what that is worth: CEFR is a framework published by the Council of Europe, not a certifying body, so a certificate from any app — ours included — is self-issued and no institution is obliged to accept it. If you need a qualification that counts, the page links the real exam for your language.
A score per question format — recognizing, recalling, listening, spelling, being understood — weighted toward recent weeks rather than a lifetime average, so it describes how the last month went instead of holding a bad first fortnight against you.
Yes, and nothing attached to them that can stop you practicing. No hearts to run out, no energy bar, no cooldown.
Yes — there are iOS and Android apps, and the web app works in any browser. It is one account and one set of progress across all three, so a unit finished on the train is finished on your laptop.
Partly. Verb conjugation, the tone and particle guides, and any unit you have saved work with no connection at all — and you can save a whole unit in advance, its words, its drill and every clip. The course itself still needs a connection to fetch new lessons and save progress. The conversation partner works offline too, since it runs on your own device.
Yes, and it follows your phone’s own setting by default rather than forcing a choice on you.
Spanish, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), German, Italian, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese. More are in development.
Yes. You start building real comprehension from day one, even with zero prior knowledge. Most users start with no experience in their target language.
The closest comparison isn't an app — it's the gym. Duolingo is walking past a gym and looking at the machines. Wekos is the rep. You show up, you drill real sentences, you leave. The reps compound. No gamification, no cartoon mascots. Just efficient drilling that respects your time and actually builds fluency.
Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin in simplified characters, Cantonese in traditional characters as spoken in Hong Kong, and standard French, German, Italian and Japanese. The audio and the slang match the variety rather than averaging across everywhere it is spoken.
Still have questions?
Email us at team@wekos.app.