Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Croatian while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Croatian by reading real books. Every sentence appears as parallel text, so you tap any word for an instant translation, hear native narration, and save new words to review later. It works on iOS and Android, and you can import your own books in Croatian.
Every Croatian sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Croatian vocabulary and grammar in context, no stopping to look up words.
Turn on the audio and follow along with your eyes, a great way to level up your Croatian listening and pronunciation.
Spaced repetition is one of the most rigorously studied learning techniques of the last century, repeatedly shown to outperform cramming and re-reading by a wide margin. Lingo7 tracks every word you tap while reading and brings it back for review right before you'd forget it. 14 different exercises, from quick recognition to active recall, typing and pronunciation, strengthen memory from every angle.
See a word and pick the correct translation from four options
Listen to a word and choose the correct translation, trains your ear
Build the word letter by letter from scrambled characters
See a word and a translation, quickly decide if it's correct
Pronounce the word and get instant accuracy feedback
Try to recall the translation from memory before revealing it
Your favorite novel, your work textbook, your kid's bedtime story, drop any EPUB, PDF or DOCX into Lingo7 and it becomes a parallel-reading experience in Croatian. No book is off limits.
Drop in an EPUB, PDF or DOCX and Lingo7 instantly turns every page into parallel reading, original on one side, Croatian translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Croatian, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Croatian, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
Ništa nije istinitije od fiziognomije, uzete u vezi s načinom. Umijeće čitanja te knjige u kojoj Vječna Mudrost obvezuje svako ljudsko biće da predstavi svoju vlastitu stranicu s individualnim karakterom napisanom na njoj, teško je, možda, i malo je proučavano.
Fiziognomija je istinita kad promatrate ponašanje. Umijeće čitanja lica i njihova karaktera je teško. Možda zahtijeva prirodni talent. Potrebno je strpljenje i trud.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Croatian with audio and parallel translation.
Real stories from language learners around the world
The 5 principles every polyglot uses, built into Lingo7.
Principle: Extensive reading, consuming large volumes of text you can mostly understand, is one of the most research-backed paths to fluency (Krashen's input hypothesis). The trick is removing friction so you can read a lot without stopping.
How Lingo7 helps: Parallel translation sits right next to the original, no dictionary lookups, no breaking flow. Turbo mode highlights words in rhythm if you lose your place, so you can devour pages instead of decoding them.
Principle: Spaced repetition is one of the most rigorously studied learning techniques of the last century. The idea: review each word just before you would have forgotten it, that's when a single repetition strengthens memory the most.
How Lingo7 helps: Lingo7's spaced repetition system tracks every word you save and brings it back at the optimal interval. You don't schedule anything, the algorithm handles timing, and 14 different exercises keep memory sharp from every angle.
Principle: Polyglots don't memorize every word in order, they focus on the ones that pay off. High-frequency words dominate everyday language: a few hundred of the most common words are enough to start understanding real books, conversations, and articles.
How Lingo7 helps: Two frequency-ranked starter collections built from corpus data, the 100 most popular words to get off the ground, then 250 more for real traction. Available in 49 languages. Learn the minimum that gives you the maximum, instead of chasing a dictionary you'll never finish.
Principle: Boring textbooks kill motivation. Polyglots choose texts they actually enjoy, favorite books, articles, scripts, because interest is what sustains daily practice for months and years, not willpower.
How Lingo7 helps: A large, growing library across genres, classic novels, contemporary articles, topic summaries. You pick what you actually care about, not what a textbook assigns. Interest does the hard work of keeping you consistent.
Principle: Real progress happens when reading, listening, vocabulary, and pronunciation reinforce each other. A word you've read, heard, and pronounced is remembered in a way that isolated drilling can't match, overall results grow stronger than the sum of individual exercises.
How Lingo7 helps: One session covers all four: you read a page with parallel translation, listen to the narration with word-by-word highlighting, tap new words to save them, and practice pronunciation on the ones you learn. Four skills trained in parallel, in 7-15 minutes a day.
Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible and share the same grammar structure. The main differences are vocabulary preferences, Croatian's exclusive use of Latin script (Serbian uses both), and some pronunciation patterns. Speakers communicate without difficulty across these varieties.
Croatian is FSI Category III (about 1100 hours). It has seven cases, complex verb aspects, and a pitch accent system. However, its spelling is perfectly phonetic, meaning words are always pronounced as written. This makes reading practice particularly effective for building pronunciation skills.
Croatian is understood throughout Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro, covering a combined population of over 20 million. Croatia is one of Europe's top tourist destinations. Knowing Croatian enhances travel experiences along the Dalmatian coast and enables deeper cultural connections.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Croatian.
An honest, curated guide to the best Croatian books to learn by reading, from A1 to C1+. Folk tales, Brlić-Mažuranić, Andrić, Krleža, and why the Latin alphabet makes Croatian easier to start than you think.
Read more →MethodologyWhat CEFR level can read books? A reader's guide to A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2: the can-do descriptors, rough vocabulary size, and what to read at each level.
Read more →MethodologyWhat comprehensible input is, Krashen's input hypothesis and the i+1 idea, why it matters, its honest limits, and how to find your level by CEFR with reading.
Read more →Croatian connects you to the Adriatic coast, Central European culture, and a literary tradition shared across the former Yugoslav space, while providing mutual intelligibility with Serbian and Bosnian.
Croatian has a pitch accent system with rising and falling tones on short and long vowels, uses only the Latin alphabet (unlike Serbian which uses both), and features strict phonemic spelling where each letter represents exactly one sound.
Find the best Croatian books for your level →
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