Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Italian while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Italian 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 Italian.
Every Italian sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Italian 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 Italian 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 Italian. 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, Italian translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Italian, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Italian, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
Non c'è nulla di più vero della fisiognomica, presa in connessione con il modo di fare. L'arte di leggere quel libro di cui la Saggezza Eterna obbliga ogni creatura umana a presentare la propria pagina con il carattere individuale scritto sopra, è forse difficile e poco studiata.
La fisiognomica è vera quando guardi i modi. L'arte di leggere i volti con il loro carattere è difficile. Forse richiede una predisposizione naturale.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Italian 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.
Italian is FSI Category I, requiring approximately 750 hours for proficiency. Its phonetic spelling system makes reading straightforward once you learn a few rules. For English speakers, the large shared Latin vocabulary provides a strong foundation from day one.
Italian and Spanish share about 82% lexical similarity and very similar grammar structures. A Spanish speaker can often understand written Italian with minimal study. Learning one significantly accelerates learning the other, and reading in both languages reinforces this mutual intelligibility.
Beyond Italy, Italian is spoken in Switzerland, San Marino, and Vatican City. It is essential for careers in fashion, design, food industry, classical music, and art history. Italian is also the fourth most-studied language in the world.
The subjunctive mood, complex pronoun placement, and grammatical gender are common challenges. However, Italian pronunciation is very regular and spelling is nearly phonetic. Extensive reading helps internalize grammar patterns naturally through repeated exposure.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Italian.
A curated, level-by-level guide to the best Italian books to learn Italian through reading, graded readers, accessible classics, and real literature, with honest difficulty notes.
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 →Italian grants access to one of the world's richest cultural heritages in art, music, opera, cuisine, and fashion, plus the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Eco in their original language.
Italian retains the closest resemblance to Latin among major Romance languages, features musical intonation with geminate consonants, and has a rich system of diminutives and augmentatives that add expressive nuance.
Find the best Italian books for your level →
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