Questions
Answered plainly, including the uncomfortable ones.
Is Lingua Serena a course or an app?
Lingua Serena is not a course with lessons to complete. It is a private language house: a room, an AI tutor, and a memory. You speak the target language from the first exchange, you are corrected the way you asked to be, and after nine minutes the tutor writes down what it learned about you. There are no units, no streaks and no mascots.
Which languages do you teach?
Lingua Serena teaches four languages: Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese. Each has its own tutors, twelve scenario rooms across the house, a briefing voice and its own register traps, such as usted and tú in Spanish or keigo in Japanese. There is no fifth language until these four are excellent, and no phrasebook mode.
Is my tutor a real person?
No. Every tutor at Lingua Serena is an AI model, labelled as one on every card and inside every session. It has no hometown, no credentials and no invented biography. What it does have is a manner of speaking, a register and a rule about when to correct you. Ask it where it is from and it will say it is an AI tutor.
Do you certify CEFR levels?
Lingua Serena does not certify CEFR levels. We estimate your comfort in plain words, such as comfortable in simple transactions, can hold a dinner table, or can negotiate, and we write it that way. We do not issue certificates, we do not claim B2, and we do not imply an accredited assessment. No one should buy a language credential from a website.
How does the tutor remember me?
After each closed session, a Lingua Serena tutor writes one to four factual notes of 140 characters or fewer, such as your daughter marrying in Lyon next June, or that the subjunctive after ojalá is where you stop. At the next session it recalls exactly one of them, in the target language, and never more than three recalls in a week.
Can I delete what you remember?
Yes. Every note a Lingua Serena tutor writes about you appears in The Ledger, where you can rewrite the wording or delete it. Deletion is permanent and immediate: the note is gone from the record and never resurfaces in a session. Nothing is stored that you cannot see there, and session audio is never recorded at all.
Do you score my accent?
No. Lingua Serena does not score accent or analyse your voice. We do not measure phonemes, we do not rate how foreign you sound, and we never display an accent percentage. What the house records is pace and choice: how long you took to answer, how often you paused, and whether you switched to English. Pronunciation is reported only as recognised or not recognised.
What is the hesitation band?
The hesitation band is Lingua Serena's plain summary of how you moved through a session. It has three values: settled, working and hesitant. It is built from response latency, pause count and how often you reached for English, normalised to you rather than to anyone else. It never measures accent, and its definition sits beside it wherever it appears.
How long is a session?
A Lingua Serena session is nine minutes, because that is the length of time an adult actually has on a Tuesday. Sessions run in three movements: one recall, one room with a single objective, and one sentence, called The Line, that you must say correctly before you leave. You may end a session early; the house takes the note either way.
What happens if speech recognition fails?
When browser speech recognition fails, Lingua Serena says so and offers typed input rather than marking you wrong. Recognition quality depends on your language, device and microphone, and Japanese in particular is harder for browsers than Spanish. The tutor treats a failed recognition as a failed recognition: nothing is recorded against you for the microphone's limits.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. Lingua Serena is built for the nine minutes you have, usually on a phone with one hand free. Every page is readable and every session is usable on a small screen, because the layout adjusts rather than demanding a desktop. Voice input needs a browser that supports speech recognition; typed input works everywhere.
What does it cost and is there a free trial?
Lingua Serena costs $149 for The Year, $390 for The Salon, or $399 once for the Founding Thousand, limited to a thousand numbered places and refused at the 1,001st. There is no monthly billing and nothing renews silently. One session is free before any of this, with no card and no account needed to begin.