Small doses. Low effort. High immersion. That's how your brain learns best.
Try first with no card. No commitment.
Recorded straight from the live product. No mockups, no staged screens.
Type a topic - your dog, the Baltic Sea, a heist in a bakery - and the story engine writes an original story around it, at your level, with cover art of its own. Caring what happens next is the whole trick: attention does the memorizing for you.
Tap a line for its English. Tap a single word and it opens up: the meaning, the sentence broken down word by word, each one there to hear on its own. Every word you save lands in your Lexicon with the sentence it lived in, and comes back to you later as review.
Listen Along reads your story out loud and walks the page with the voice, line by line. German and English each get their own speed, so you can take the German down to 0.5x and leave the English where it is. Read a chapter tonight and replay it on tomorrow's walk.
Fourteen classic works and counting: Grimm and Hauff fairy tales, Sherlock Holmes, Storm's Immensee, Kafka's Die Verwandlung. Set the box size to Tiny and a long literary sentence arrives in pieces you can actually hold. Mark the line that lost you and send it to your Learning Journal to ask about later.
Paste any text into the Parlor - an article, a song, a letter - and it becomes a LinguaLume book: split into pieces at the size you choose, English one tap away, narration included. Paste it in English and it comes back to you in German. It is yours alone unless you share it, and you can add the next section whenever you are ready.
Set a weekly goal and it counts every kind of German you do, not just reading. Then, when you want a real measure, flip a story card: the English tucks away, you read it in German alone, and you get back your speed in words per minute and a question about the story, asked in German. Take your time - slow is steady, and steady is fast.
All of it is in the free start. No card.
Try it now
The reader below is the live product, not a mockup. Tap any German line for the English, then switch levels to see how the same story engine writes at three difficulties.
The science
You learn to read a language fastest when you understand about 98% of the words on the page - Paul Nation's coverage research, replicated for decades. Below that line, reading collapses into decoding. At it, your brain does what it did with your first language: absorbs patterns from meaning. The catch was always supply - nobody could write you enough German at exactly your 98%. Now it isn't a catch.
So we built Picture-First Reading. Inside the app, every generated line lands in three beats:
One short English line sets the scene, so you already know what's happening before you read a word of German.
You read the German with the picture already in your head - comprehension first, not cold decoding, one word at a time.
A tap brings the meaning back a second time, in context - contextual repetition, the kind that sticks.
The only thing you risk is another year of translating in your head.
Try it on a real storyHow it works
One topic is enough. A hobby, a city, a person you miss - anything you'd actually want to read about.
Tap any line to see the English. No dictionary, no tab-switching, no guessing.
It gets harder exactly as you get better - so it never stops being readable, and never stops moving.
The library
Every story LinguaLume writes starts level-matched to you. When you're ready for more, the library holds real German writing too: fourteen works and counting, from the Brothers Grimm and Hauff fairy tales through Sherlock Holmes and Storm's Immensee, all the way to Kafka's Die Verwandlung. Each edition is prepared line by line so you can read it the LinguaLume way, English one tap away.
Why this works when apps haven't
Flashcards train you to answer. Reading trains you to understand. Everything in LinguaLume is built on the second one.
Drills build declarative memory - facts you recall slowly, one at a time. Reading builds procedural memory: patterns that fire on their own, the way typing does.
Attention rides on caring what happens next. That's why every story is written about something you already love - not a unit about ordering coffee.
No day-one speaking exam. Recognition comes first; speaking gets easier when the patterns are already there - and it stays optional, always.
Full access, zero risk
Not a sampler. The whole product, free to start - and when you're ready to subscribe, that begins with a full 5-day free trial too. You'll know it works long before you pay a cent.
Start free with every feature. Subscribing later begins with a 5-day free trial - cancel anytime, and we'll remind you before you're charged. A single tutoring hour costs more than a month of LinguaLume. Prices in USD; local taxes may apply.
Sign in with Google - about a minute. No card.
Questions
No. LinguaLume is reading-and-listening first. Speaking practice exists for when you want it - and it's always optional.
None. Stories start at true-beginner level and rise exactly as you do. If you can read this page, you can start tonight.
Yes - every feature, no card, the moment you create an account. If you subscribe later, that starts with a 5-day free trial too. Cancel anytime.
Each one is written for you, on demand, by our story engine - that's the only way "about anything, at exactly your level" is possible. The library editions are real German literature, prepared by hand.
Change it. The difficulty dial runs from true beginner upward, and stories adapt as your reading gets stronger. The demo above shows the same story world at three difficulty bands.
Yes. Paste anything you have into the Parlor - an article, song lyrics, a letter - and it becomes the same tap-to-understand reading experience, narration included.
