Fluent Forever, an app designed to help users learn new languages, became the most well-funded app on crowdfunding site Kickstarter after raising $562,535.

The sum is well in excess of the company’s target of $250,000 and was raised by 4,245 backers.

App developer Gabriel Wyner claimed it is the first capable of teaching users a new language. It is “designed to take you from nothing all the way to fluency in your language of choice.”

Users start by learning pronunciation, “because when words don’t sound foreign anymore, they stick. This takes a couple of weeks.” The next step for users is to memorise translations.

“If you’re learning Spanish, then everything you look at on a daily basis is a combination of Spanish and pictures. No English,” Wyner explained on the Kickstarter page.

The funding enables Fluent Forever to offer an initial lineup of 12 languages including English, Arabic and Hebrew. Over time, the plan is to add Japanese and Mandarin to the list of languages, enable native support for tablets with synchronisation across devices, and a monolingual dictionary feature.

A basic subscription costs $6 a month, offering limited image search and read-only access to the community database. The full subscription ($12 a month) opens the ability to ask native speakers grammar questions.