Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your English while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning English 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 English.
Every English sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing English 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 English 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 English. 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, English translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in English, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier English, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection with manner. The art of reading that book of which Eternal Wisdom obliges every human creature to present his or her own page with the individual character written on it, is a difficult one, perhaps, and is little studied.
Physiognomy is true when you look at manner. The art of reading faces with their character is hard. Maybe it needs natural skill. It needs patience and effort.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for English 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.
Approximately 1.5 billion people speak English as a first or second language, making it the most widely spoken language globally. It serves as an official language in over 60 countries.
English spelling reflects centuries of borrowing from French, Latin, Greek, and Norse, each bringing its own spelling conventions. The Great Vowel Shift further disconnected pronunciation from spelling. Reading extensively in English helps internalize these patterns naturally.
English has no grammatical gender, minimal verb conjugation, and no case system for nouns. Word order (subject-verb-object) carries most grammatical meaning, making basic sentence construction relatively straightforward.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in English.
From 'once upon a time' to real literature: an honest guide to the best English books for every level, plus how to learn English through reading well.
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 →English is the global lingua franca, providing access to the largest body of scientific, business, and entertainment content in any language.
English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language, drawing from Germanic, Romance, and many other sources, and relies heavily on word order rather than inflection for grammar.
Find the best English books for your level →
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