Did you study a language for multiple years in high school or college? Did you learn a language while studying abroad? Now ask yourself if you could hold a basic conversation in that language if somebody fluent were to come up to you right now. If you’re like me, and hundreds of other people, you likely can’t. When I try to speak Spanish with someone, there always comes a point where I have to pull out my Google Translate app or start doing some poor form of charades. Needless to say, knowing a language other than your own comes in handy for countless situations, including traveling, business, communicating with family members, and so on.

Why is it that learning languages seems reasonably manageable, but retaining that conversational knowledge is exponentially more difficult? A polyglot from Los Angeles named Gabriel Wyner has an answer, and what he thinks is a solution. On September 19th, Wyner launched a Kickstarter campaign for a language-learning app called Fluent Forever. It quickly became the most funded app in Kickstarter history, surpassing its $250,000 funding goal in just over 17 hours. As of today, the campaign has 3,639 backers with a total funding of $495,134.

Wyner received bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and vocal arts performance at USC, and went on to pursue a master's degree in singing in Vienna, Austria. While in Vienna, he shifted his focus from opera to learning languages. He’s now fluent in eight languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, Hungarian, and Japanese. “I had a terrible experience learning Hebrew and Russian in high school,” Wyner tells The Verge. “I didn’t actually learn anything, which seems to be a common experience in the States.”

His first successful experience learning a language was with German, in an immersion-style program called German for Singers, in Middlebury, Vermont. After moving to Italy for a short period of time in 2008, Wyner came back to Middlebury to try to learn French. In order to get himself into an intermediate course, given his knowledge of Italian, Wyner cheated on his online placement test with Google Translate. Unfortunately, he did too well on the test and was placed into the intermediate level class that required students to do a 15-minute interview in French. Wyner only had three months to learn French, and in a state of panic he found a language-learning flashcard software called Anki. Instead of using Anki for word-to-word translations, he used it for pictures and sentences. The interview came around and Wyner ended up being placed in an advanced class because he had reached near fluency through the learning methods he had developed using Anki.

This is where Wyner’s key learning came from, and it led him to publish a Lifehacker article that went viral. That led to his first book, Fluent Forever, and his first Kickstarter campaign that consisted of pronunciation training products within Anki. The project originally had 11 products promised, but ended up delivering 65 due to its success. Wyner’s method was unique in that it did not focus on translation, but rather on pronunciation, and building associations between a particular list of words with larger concepts. “The way that most languages work is you put things in categories like, ‘I’m going learn my colors today, and all my numbers tomorrow,’ which is terrible from a memory standpoint. But if you learn colors like, ‘I’m going to learn red, apple, delicious, lunch, knife, and piece,’ I’m learning the things that would be involved in cutting a piece of a red apple. That ends up being significantly more memorable than just random words.”

The Fluent Forever app essentially takes Wyner’s products that he developed within Anki, removes the difficultly of learning a specific piece of third-party software, and brings it to the palm of your hand in an easy-to-use app. When you first enter the app, you’re taken through three to four videos about your language of choice’s alphabet, its consonants and vowels, and the spelling rules that produce those consonants and vowels. Any language that has a new alphabet uses a series of visual mnemonic devices. “Say B is for Boy,” Wyner explains. “We commissioned artists to create a B that is hunched over in the shape of a boy.”

After you’ve had some time to learn the pronunciation, you’re taken through a 625-word list. The list is based off of the publicly available General Service List, which Wyner customized to eliminate words he felt would not be essential (e.g., watermelon). You can either learn words with a picture, or with sentences. All of this is in done in a simple flashcard format with audio recordings. There are three options for the sentences, with varying levels of difficulty, creating 1,875 sentences total that you can learn with. If you have questions about word choice or grammar within any of the sentences, you can ask in a discussion thread attached to each sentence, and a native speaker will respond.

If you choose to learn a word with image association, the app presents you with eight options all sourced from Google Images. For example, if you’re learning the word for “dog” in French, the image selection will be sourced from French websites through the search word “chien.” This is important because it will actually show you images of dogs that are more commonly associated with French, which are usually smaller and cuter. It’s these kinds of associations that Wyner says create distinct memories that allow you to retain a language.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you can browse through additional words and sentence combinations from a proofread community database. This is where a crowdsourcing aspect of the app comes in. If a language is not supported on the app, you can begin to add your own sentences from outside learning through a tutor or through traditional books. Fluent Forever has resources on its site that allow you to find a tutor, will set you up with an interface that allows you to build resources for the language, and then you can add it to the app.

Through this, Wyner says, it should be feasible to learn a level one language, such as Spanish or French, in six months with 30 to 60 minutes of practice a day. Level two languages include Greek and Russian, and those will take roughly 12 months to learn, while level three languages like Japanese and Arabic will take roughly two years.

The Fluent Forever app will come out in beta starting next February for every backer of the Kickstarter campaign. It will officially launch in the App Store with Spanish support starting in April, with plans to add support for French, Italian, Russian, German, and Korean by the summer of 2018. Wyner projects that he needs a total of $850,000 to include all possible languages, which if he doesn’t get through the Kickstarter, he hopes to get through an Indiegogo campaign he is starting shortly after the Kickstarter ends.

The Kickstarter campaign ends October 19th. You can get beta access to the app by pledging $40. When the app is released worldwide, the full $12 a month subscription will give you full access to image searches, flashcard creation, and the community database for all languages, along with demo access to the pronunciation trainers and sentence lists in all of those languages. The $6 a month subscription will limit image searches and will not provide access to a native speaker for questions. If you want to access full sentence lists outside of the demos, those will be included as in-app purchases. A sentence list is priced at $25, and a pronunciation trainer is priced at $12.(A bundle of these two comes in at $30.)

“I really enjoy the process of learning how to think in a new language,” Wyner says. “People get caught up in the translation thing. I want to push this idea of, ‘I’m thinking in German,’ instead of, ‘I’m decoding my English really fast.’ That’s what I’m interested in.

Update: You can follow the Indiegogo campaign here