Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Malay while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Malay 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 Malay.
Every Malay sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Malay 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 Malay 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 Malay. 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, Malay translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Malay, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Malay, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
Tiada yang lebih benar daripada fisiognomi, apabila diambil bersama dengan tingkah laku. Seni membaca buku di mana Kebijaksanaan Abadi memaksa setiap makhluk manusia untuk mempersembahkan halamannya sendiri dengan watak individu yang tertulis di atasnya, adalah suatu kesulitan, mungkin, dan sedikit dipelajari.
Fisiognomi adalah benar apabila anda melihat pada cara. Seni membaca wajah dengan watak mereka adalah sukar. Mungkin ia memerlukan kemahiran semulajadi.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Malay 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.
Malay and Indonesian are varieties of the same language with about 80% mutual intelligibility. Malaysian Malay retains more English loanwords while Indonesian uses more Dutch-influenced terms. Grammar and core vocabulary are essentially identical. Learning either gives you access to both.
Malay is FSI Category II (about 900 hours) and is among the easiest Asian languages for English speakers. It has no tones, no conjugation, no grammatical gender, uses the Latin alphabet, and has simple grammar. Reading Malay is accessible early due to many English loanwords and phonetic spelling.
Malaysia has a strong economy in electronics, oil, and palm oil, and is a major business hub in Southeast Asia. Malay is also spoken in Singapore, Brunei, and southern Thailand. Combined with Indonesian mutual intelligibility, Malay gives access to communication with over 270 million people.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Malay.
Discover the best Malay books to learn Bahasa Melayu by reading, from folk tales and bilingual readers to literary classics, sorted by CEFR level with honest, practical advice.
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 →Malay connects you with speakers across Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and parts of Thailand, provides mutual intelligibility with Indonesian (combined 270+ million speakers), and opens doors to Southeast Asian business and culture.
Malay features reduplication to form plurals and emphasis (like "orang-orang" for "people"), uses a logical affixation system to build vocabulary from roots, and has borrowed extensively from Sanskrit, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, and English.
Find the best Malay books for your level →
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