About Kinva

Kinva exists to solve one specific problem: the vocabulary wall that stops millions of learners between everyday English and academic English — the English of universities, textbooks, research, and exams like TOEFL and IELTS.

Research in applied linguistics found that a surprisingly small set of word families — the famous 570 of the Academic Word List — covers around one in every ten words in academic texts. Master them and academic English suddenly opens up. Yet most learners never study them systematically, because doing so with a paper list is boring and ineffective.

How Kinva teaches

Every word on Kinva comes with crystal-clear pronunciation at two speeds (tap once for natural, twice for slow), a visual that anchors the meaning in your memory, a plain-English definition, a real example sentence, and a translation in your own language — the interface speaks more than a hundred languages, including Arabic.

Behind the scenes, a spaced-repetition engine schedules each word to reappear just before you would forget it. The words you find hard come back sooner; the words you know move further away. This is the most evidence-backed technique in vocabulary learning, and Kinva applies it automatically.

Beyond the word lists, Kinva publishes daily practice texts in a fill-in-the-missing-letters format, the same exercise style used by modern English proficiency tests. You solve them right on the page, save your answers, and compare with the model solution.

Free, for everyone

Kinva is completely free, supported by advertising. It was created by an independent founder who believes that the words that unlock education should never be locked behind a paywall.

Questions, ideas, or feedback? We genuinely read everything — say hello on the contact page.