Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Spanish while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Spanish 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 Spanish.
Every Spanish sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Spanish 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 Spanish 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 Spanish. 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, Spanish translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Spanish, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Spanish, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
No hay nada más cierto que la fisonomía, tomada en conexión con los modales. El arte de leer ese libro del cual la Sabiduría Eterna obliga a toda criatura humana a presentar su propia página con el carácter individual escrito en ella, es difícil, quizás, y se estudia poco.
La fisionomía es verdadera cuando miras el comportamiento. El arte de leer rostros con su carácter es difícil. Tal vez requiera habilidad natural. Requiere paciencia y esfuerzo.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Spanish 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.
The FSI estimates 750 hours (24-30 weeks) for English speakers to reach professional proficiency. Spanish is Category I, the easiest tier. Regular reading practice can help you reach conversational fluency even faster due to transparent spelling and many English cognates.
Both are FSI Category I, but Spanish pronunciation is more straightforward since it is almost perfectly phonetic. French has more complex pronunciation rules. However, French vocabulary may be slightly more familiar to English speakers due to the Norman influence on English.
Major differences exist between Castilian (Spain) and Latin American Spanish in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Latin American Spanish generally does not use the "vosotros" form and has different consonant sounds. Reading literature from various Spanish-speaking countries exposes you to these variations naturally.
Spanish is the world's fourth most-spoken language with 559 million speakers. It is the second most-spoken native language after Mandarin. Knowing Spanish opens career opportunities across the Americas, Spain, and in the growing US Hispanic market.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Spanish.
A curated, honest guide to the best Spanish books for learners at every level, from A1 graded readers to García Márquez. Learn Spanish through reading the right book at the right time.
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 →Spanish connects you with over half a billion speakers across 20 countries, from the literary works of Garcia Marquez to business opportunities throughout Latin America and Spain.
Spanish has remarkably consistent phonetic spelling, a subjunctive mood used extensively in everyday speech, and inverted punctuation marks that signal questions and exclamations before they begin.
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