Loanwords: A Multilingual Library

Learning to read in another language challenges you. It taxes your memory with new grammar and vocabulary, especially so when written in an unfamiliar script.

Here we have made a program that eases this difficulty, letting you learn to read by correlating words with their definitions and reading along with the sound of the language.

Pop in here, get some experience with some sentences, and then go play another game. Next time should be easier. You will begin to recognize the "glue words" of the language and common phrases often used in sentences. Repetition will be your friend. People are built to learn language, and it takes repeated exposure.

This is a reading library.

What is here:

25 novels, five per language, across 533 chapters. 79,310 sentences. 131 hours of narration. Every sentence defined, translated, and read aloud.

Twenty-five public domain classics (Voltaire, Sōseki, Verne, Kafka, Pérez Galdós, Collodi, Pirandello), narrated in their original French, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and German, with audio that tracks the sentence as it's read and a full dictionary breakdown one tap away.

How it works

• Select any sentence for a full study card: a natural translation, a literal word-order breakdown, and every word defined, with long or short definitions, your choice.
• Read definitions in English, or in the language you're learning itself. An immersive option that can reinforce the language.
• Grammar patterns are labeled on the card.
• See a word or grammar pattern once, then see all other sentences where it is used. Open any word and jump straight to every other sentence in the library that uses it. Hear each of those examples read aloud in its own book's narration and study the sentence's breakdown.
• Every sentence is read aloud, at full or 0.75x speed.

Read it your way

• Three reading themes: Light, Dark, Sepia.
• Adjustable text size, from compact to large print.

Giving back

• 10% of every purchase is split between the Internet Archive, home of LibriVox, the source of every narration here, and a local food bank.

The library

French: Candide, Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours, Arsène Lupin Gentleman-Cambrioleur... If you like Lupin this is a chance to read the original.

Japanese: Botchan, Kokoro, Kusamakura...

Spanish: Marianela, Cuentos de la Selva, Pepita Jiménez, Las Mil Noches y una Noche... A world-literature classic, in Spanish translation.

Italian: Le Avventure di Pinocchio, Cuore, Il fu Mattia Pascal...

German: Die Verwandlung, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Der Sandmann...

Can't read the script yet?

A built-in kana trainer takes you through hiragana and katakana. You match characters by their vowel sound and hear each one pronounced as you catch it, at whatever speed you want, with the full chart a button away.

Also, the short story Gongitsune includes more introduction to the grammar and how to read in Japanese. A gentler first step in Japanese before you're reading a full novel.

You don't have to be fluent to start. You just have to start.

And a whole second library

41 more short stories in Japanese, Spanish, and French — folk tales and fables, cut sentence by sentence, with translations, grammar notes, and audio for every single line.

Plus 4,488 English words worth knowing

An English vocabulary game built on real etymologies and 15,000 example sentences drawn from 102 classics — War and Peace, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Don Quixote. You don't just learn what a word means, you learn where it came from and see it used by someone who wrote well. Aimed at the exam-prep vocabulary range, and at anyone who just likes words.

Built for readers who already have some footing in the language and want something real to read: not textbook dialogue, actual literature, with the difficulty of lookup taken out.

Built for the couch. And the Steam Deck.