Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Danish while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Danish 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 Danish.
Every Danish sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Danish 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 Danish 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 Danish. 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, Danish translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Danish, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Danish, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
Der findes intet mere sandfærdigt end fysiognomi, taget i forbindelse med manér. Kunsten at læse den bog, som Evig Visdom påbyder hvert enkelt menneske at præsentere sin egen side af, med den individuelle karakter skrevet på, er en svær en, måske, og er kun lidt studeret.
Fysiognomi er sandt, når man ser på manerer. Kunsten at læse ansigter sammen med deres karakter er svær. Måske kræver det naturlig evne. Det kræver tålmodighed og anstrengelse.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Danish 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.
Danish pronunciation is notably challenging even for other Scandinavians due to vowel reduction, the stod (glottal stop), and soft consonants. However, Danish grammar is very simple and the written language is accessible for English speakers. Reading Danish is considerably easier than understanding spoken Danish.
Written Danish and Norwegian Bokmal are very similar (Bokmal historically derives from Danish). Spoken Danish diverges significantly due to consonant weakening and vowel shifts. Swedish differs more in vocabulary but retains clearer pronunciation. Reading Danish texts transfers well to reading Norwegian.
Denmark consistently ranks among the world's happiest and most innovative countries. Danish opens doors in design, clean energy, shipping (Maersk), pharmaceuticals (Novo Nordisk), and the famous Danish concept of hygge. It also provides reading access to Norwegian Bokmal.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Danish.
A level-by-level guide to the best Danish books to learn Danish by reading, from letlæsning easy readers and H.C. Andersen to Jussi Adler-Olsen, Smilla, and Tove Ditlevsen.
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 →Danish provides access to the works of Hans Christian Andersen and Kierkegaard in the original, connects you to Denmark's world-leading design and sustainability culture, and enables understanding of Swedish and Norwegian.
Danish features the unique stod (glottal stop) that distinguishes words, has undergone dramatic vowel weakening that makes it sound very different from its written form, and uses a vigesimal (base-20) counting system.
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