Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Filipino while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Filipino 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 Filipino.
Every Filipino sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Filipino 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 Filipino 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 Filipino. 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, Filipino translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Filipino, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Filipino, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
Walang mas totoo pa kaysa sa pisyonomiya, kapag isinama sa asal. Ang sining ng pagbasa ng aklat na iyon na kung saan ang Walang Hanggang Karunungan ay inaatasan ang bawat nilalang na iharap ang kanyang sariling pahina na may nakasulat na indibidwal na karakter, ay isang mahirap na gawain, marahil, at kaunti lamang ang nag-aaral nito.
Ang pisyonomiya ay totoo kapag tinitingnan mo ang asal. Ang sining ng pagbabasa ng mga mukha kasama ang kanilang karakter ay mahirap. Siguro kailangan nito ng likas na kakayahan.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Filipino 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.
Filipino is the national language of the Philippines, based on Tagalog with additions from other Philippine languages, Spanish, and English. In practice, Filipino and Tagalog are mutually intelligible and nearly identical. The distinction is primarily political rather than linguistic.
Filipino is FSI Category III (about 1100 hours). Its focus/voice system is conceptually challenging for English speakers, but it has no tones, simple phonology, and uses the Latin alphabet. The extensive English and Spanish loanwords in Filipino make reading immediately rewarding with many recognizable words.
The Philippines has over 110 million people and a large global diaspora. Filipino is useful for business process outsourcing, travel across the archipelago, and cultural connection. While many Filipinos speak English, knowing Filipino deepens cultural understanding and opens doors that English alone cannot.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Filipino.
A curated, honest guide to the best Filipino and Tagalog books for learners at every level, folk tales, children's books, Bob Ong, Rizal, plus how to read them to learn Filipino faster.
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 →Filipino connects you with over 80 million speakers in the Philippines, one of the largest English-speaking countries in Asia, and a rapidly growing BPO and tech sector with strong cultural ties to the US.
Filipino uses a focus/voice system where verbs change form to indicate whether the actor, object, location, or instrument is the topic of the sentence, creating a unique perspective-shifting grammar system unlike European languages.
Find the best Filipino books for your level →
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