Learn Spanish with stories you love
Bored with conventional lessons?
Learn Spanish faster with stories and articles that genuinely interest you
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It is difficult to give something that is so young a five star rating, but this is already one of the best sites (along with stuff like Anki, Memrise, "X"Pod, Duolingo, LingQ, etc.) around for this and it is only getting better.
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Click any word on a website to translate it
Simply click words or phrases on any site to translate them.
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Practice these words with flashcards
All the words you translate are saved and you can practice them on the Flashcards Page whenever you want.
Shed light on those tough phrases
In my experience, English translations help a lot. You should try them instead of Spanish dictionaries because they enable super fast understanding. This is not laziness! The extra work of deciphering a Spanish definition can distract you from the text, and cause you to lose focus and hence motivation. If you prefer using a Spanish dictionary, that’s completely fine, but give translations a shot in the interactive demo below and judge their usefulness yourself:
Try it on any word or phrase below
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I use it everyday, I love how easy it is to pick new words I want to learn. I feel like I can finally read a book on a computer screen, something I've never been able to do before! So, thank you for this wonderful program :)
What’s available to read?
You can read the news, novels, biographies, song lyrics, whatever interests you. Some of the most popular websites with users of the Web Reader Chrome Extension are:
- EL PAÍS - a popular Spanish newspaper
- BBC Mundo - BBC news in Spanish
- Cuentosinfin - A collection of classic short stories
- Wikipedia - The Spanish wikipedia
- Spanish Podcast - Podcasts for Spanish learners with transcriptions
In addition, texts and videos are shared amongst the Readlang community, for example:
- Conversation - YouTube video with transcript of casual conversational speech.
- Sitcom for Spanish learners - A sitcom for language learners.
- La Bella Durmiente - The classic fairy tale Sleeping Beauty in Spanish.
- Don Quixote - A novel by Cervantes, the “Spanish Shakespeare”, only advanced students need apply!
And the best source of all… you! This is a flexible tool for whatever interests you, whether it’s science fiction, current affairs, technology blogs, or Harry Potter. You can read any website or upload any plain text or epub text to your private account on Readlang.
Get words to stick
While you read, Readlang stores every word and phrase you translate as a flashcard to help you learn. These flashcards use a spaced repetition algorithm to schedule words at intervals which optimize the rate of vocabulary acquisition. It operates similar to the popular open source app Anki, and in fact you can export your list of words to study in Anki if you prefer.
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ReadLang saves you time by streamlining the process of creating a flashcard. Cards are created in the moment instead of having to stop what you are doing and open a new application to create a card or trying to remember at a later time.
If you decide to use Readlang’s flashcard system instead of Anki’s you’ll get one key benefit. Your words will be prioritized based on their frequency. This further optimizes the learning process by teaching you the most useful words in the language first.
So… what’s this going to cost me?
Not much, in fact everything is free with generous limits, or unlimited usage is only $5 / month or $48 / year.
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Readlang is probably my top resource now for learning new languages. Whenever I don't feel like studying properly, I can just read an article in a foreign language and enjoy it, without having to worry about looking up words that I don't understand. It makes reading in a foreign language a much quicker and more enjoyable experience!