Learn languages effortlessly through stories written with love

Why does it work?

What makes your stories different?

Our stories are about 40–45k words each. Not too short to feel meaningless, not too long to bore you to death like an ancient tome. The stories are light-hearted, humorous, quirky and fun to make your language learning journey as stress-free as possible and something you’ll look forward to and gladly come back to.

With this, we’re trying to prevent what linguist Stephen Krashen calls “Affective Filter Hypothesis” — the idea that anxiety, stress, and negative emotions block language acquisition.

What makes you different from bilingual books?

You read primarily in the language you’re familiar with, not struggling with foreign words because your brain instinctively translates them thanks to the surrounding context.

You may have heard of this technique under a term “diglot weave” (yes, that’s an actual term and no, it’s not a Pokémon’s ability). In academic circles, the theory behind it is known as “The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis (i+1)” — a concept by linguist Stephen Krashen stating that language is acquired (not just learned) when learners understand messages in a new language that are slightly above their current level, focusing on meaning rather than grammatical rules.

However, if you’d still like bilingual book-like experience, then just choose Bilingual mode when opening a tale. You will have both translations side by side, you can click/taptap on any word or phrase to see its translation, hear its pronunciation and everything added to your vocabulary will be automatically highlighted to easily see how it’s used in context.

That means you just flip a word now and then?

We don’t just teach words but lexical units, the natural building blocks of language! Languages aren’t just about translating word after word. Some words form groups that need to be translated together as otherwise they wouldn’t make any sense in the other language when translated individually. And that’s without even mentioning idioms! Those can be a real head-scratcher!

Linguist Michael Lewis called this “The Lexical Approach” — he argued that language is “grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar” and emphasized teaching chunks rather than individual words.

Also, linguist Paul Nation argues that learners need to understand roughly 95–98% of words in a text to read comfortably and infer unknown words.

So I can only learn the words the story picks for me?

The Tailored Journey (our adaptive difficulty) adjusts to your knowledge and your lesson performance in our exercises while reading, so the reading stays comfortable. Alternatively, there are 5 preset difficulty levels that keep the pace steady. However, whatever you choose, you’re not locked in. You can select any word or phrase on the page to translate it and add it to your vocabulary and practice it in exercises, or just play the audio and listen to its pronunciation.

And since we mentioned it — every lexical unit comes with pronunciation audio, in the tales themselves, the vocabulary, and the exercises.

So you just threw a bunch of scientific terms together to look cool?

Hah, not really. One of us learned their first few Italian words from Assassin’s Creed II and can still recall them almost twenty years later, despite never having been to Italy or studied Italian. One day, when we moved to a new country, in an effort to learn the local language, we were looking for something that would work the same way but came up empty-handed, so we made it ourselves. Our focus was to create something that felt intuitive to us and only after we were almost done did we find out there are extensive scientific discussions around these exact concepts. While we would like to be the first, being backed by science is nice too!