Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Icelandic while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Icelandic 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 Icelandic.
Every Icelandic sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Icelandic 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 Icelandic 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 Icelandic. 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, Icelandic translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Icelandic, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Icelandic, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
Það er ekkert sannara en andlitsfræði, tengt við framkomu. Listin að lesa bókina sem Eilíf viska skyldar hverja manneskju til að bera fram sína eigin blaðsíðu með persónulegum karakter á, er kannski erfið og lítið rannsökuð.
Að lesa í útlit er satt þegar þú horfir á hegðun. Listin að lesa í andlit og persónueinkenni þeirra er erfið. Kannski þarf náttúrulega hæfni. Það þarf þolinmæði og áreynslu.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Icelandic 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.
Yes, Icelandic is significantly harder than other Scandinavian languages (FSI Category III vs Category I). It preserves Old Norse grammar with four cases, three genders, and complex conjugation that Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish have simplified. However, reading Icelandic sagas in the original is a unique and rewarding experience.
Largely yes. Icelandic has changed so little in 1,000 years that modern speakers can read medieval sagas and eddas with relative ease. This makes learning Icelandic uniquely rewarding for literature enthusiasts, as it opens access to the entire corpus of Norse mythology and medieval Scandinavian literature.
Icelandic actively creates neologisms from native roots rather than borrowing from English or other languages. "Computer" is "tolva" (number-prophetess), "telephone" is "simi" (thread). This linguistic purism means learners build vocabulary through understanding word-formation patterns rather than recognizing international words.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Icelandic.
From Litli prinsinn to the sagas, a level-by-level guide to the best books to learn Icelandic and grow your reading from first sentences to Laxness.
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 →Icelandic provides direct access to the medieval Norse sagas in their original language, preserves Old Norse grammar nearly unchanged for 1,000 years, and connects you to Iceland's extraordinary literary culture (the most books published per capita globally).
Icelandic has changed so little since the 13th century that modern speakers can read medieval sagas with minimal difficulty, maintains four cases, three genders, complex verb conjugation, and creates all new vocabulary from native roots rather than borrowing foreign words.
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