Why I built Linqua

I taught IELTS in Yantai, China in 2002, with short stints in Beijing and Qingdao. This was pre-smartphone, pre-YouTube, and for most of my students, I was one of a handful of native speakers they'd ever spoken to, and time they had with me each week was the only real English conversation in their lives.

Writing, reading, listening we could teach. Speaking was the one that broke the system. My students could write a decent essay and parse a dense listening passage, then freeze in a mock test. Not because they didn't know the language. Because they'd never used it under pressure, with a real person on the other side of the table.

One student stays with me. Near the top of the group in everything; reading, writing, listening. Worked harder than anyone. But he'd tied himself in knots on speaking, drilling phonetics and pronunciation instead of actually talking. He could tell you the difference between a long and short vowel. He couldn't hold a natural conversation. He'd mastered the bits you can teach from a book and fallen at the only bit you can't. That wasn't a him problem. It was a system problem - he had no one to practise with, so he practised the things he could do alone, and none of them were the thing the examiner would actually test.

The problem stuck with me for twenty years. Then in 2026 two things happened at once: live AI avatars got good enough to hold a real conversation, and AI made it possible for someone like me to actually build software that works.

So I built Linqua. It's the only IELTS speaking practice that recreates the real exam; face-to-face, one-to-one, same format, same timings, same pressure. Most practice tools test your skills. Linqua tests your nerves too, because that's what the real exam does, and that's where most candidates lose marks. It's what I wish I could have given that student in 2002.