Last month we promised to bring you more goodies. Well, here they are!

Exercises now also live in the tale

Until now, exercises lived only on their own page. As of today, you can also find them at the bottom of every tale page. Read the page, practice the words it introduced, and then turn to the next page. Twenty exercises stand between you and the next page. But do not worry, they are friendlier than it sounds. Our exercises are designed so that you never get deadlocked. Every exercise has a hint so that even if you get stuck, you can always eventually get it right.

The exercises are built from the page you have just read and, as of the second page, also from the pages before it. Everything you answer is stamped, counted, and added to your Vocabulary the moment you get it right.

An exercise block under a tale page, with the words of the page to reorder and an APPROVED stamp — Practice makes perfect

If you would prefer reading without interruptions, the reading settings have a switch for it. Switch it off and the pages turn as before.

The Show exercises switch in the reading settings, with its tooltip open — One switch, no interruptions

The Tailored Journey

Five difficulty levels asked you to guess your level before you had read a single sentence. Now there is a new option, and it is the one we recommend: the Tailored Journey! It starts light and adjusts to how you do in the exercises, page by page. Do well and more foreign words appear. Struggle and the tale eases off. It learns from your performance, so with the exercises switched off it stays where it is.

Hints in parentheses stay on while you are at the beginning and disappear once the journey passes its midway point, unless you turn them back on yourself in the settings, in which case your choice persists.

To accommodate this new option, the difficulty selector received a little facelift:

The redesigned difficulty selection with the Tailored Journey, the five preset levels, and Bilingual mode — The five levels are still there, one tap away

The five preset difficulty levels still exist. Just select the second option and they’ll appear. And for those who would prefer the classical experience of bilingual books with both translations side by side, you can now select it right as you’re opening the tale.

To see the effects of the adaptive difficulty, here’s page 50 from our new tale, The Farm Resistance, two different amounts of Spanish:

The same tale page with more Spanish words, hints on by default — This is how the Tailored Journey starts

The same tale page with more Spanish words, hints turned off — The same without hints

The same tale page with many Spanish words and no hints — This is when you’re too good

Audio! Every single word, spoken aloud

Since late August, every lexical unit in all four languages comes with pronunciation audio. We never gave it a proper introduction, so here it is.

Every word has a recording in a male and a female voice, as sometimes they can differ quite a bit in some languages. For students of English, every lexical unit also has British English and American English variants (so four per lexical unit). All the variants cycle so if you want to hear the other one, just tap or click the icon again.

In the tale, click any word or phrase to hear its pronunciation (or tap it on a touch device).

A tooltip over a phrase showing its translation, with the hints click to hear this phrase and right-click to learn it — The tooltip now says what every click or tap does, so you never have to guess

The reading settings let you choose which words answer.

The Click to hear setting with the options No, Foreign only, and All — All of them, only the translated ones, or none at all for quiet reading

The page summary can speak too. Each card now has a speaker icon, signifying it has audio. Just click or tap it to hear it.

The page summary with four word cards, each with a speaker icon, and the XP ledger below — Click any card to hear pronunciation

Every Vocabulary entry now has a speaker icon.

Two Vocabulary entries with speaker icons next to the Spanish words — Just click or tap the speaker icon

To practice listening during exercises, every exercise now reads the answer after a successful submission. Should you want a quiet practice session, you can mute them with the button in the bottom left corner.

An exercise with the speaker button in its footer highlighted — The mute button, for practicing in silence

All the audio has been generated with the Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS model. While we would love to hire actual voice actors one day (Peter Marinker would definitely be one of our picks!), it is at the moment prohibitively expensive for us to do so. But we think it’s a decent solution for the time being.

Should you come across any strange mispronunciations, please don’t hesitate to let us know so we can fix them as soon as possible.

AI can be frustrating but also funny

We struggled a bit to explain to the model that we only need it to pronounce the text we’re sending it. The prompt had to be very specific such as “Pronounce the following text for dictionary pronunciation literally and nothing else.” Sometimes, the results genuinely surprised us.

For example, when the word was “sigh”, we received half a minute of AI sighing in our ears. When the word was “singing”, we received a whole two minutes of cringeworthy singing which was so unbelievably awful that we still unfortunately can’t forget it. When the word was “spontaneous”, we received a minute-and-a-half ramble about the AI’s favorite Halloween costume. In the end, it turned out that Google has another endpoint that should supposedly work better for this purpose, with which we ended up having more success. But yeah, AI can be frustrating but also funny.

The Farm Resistance has arrived

The tale has been on the shelves since August, but as of today it is bound in Russian as well, therefore we wrote a proper introduction. Or skip the introduction and join the resistance directly.

And a few small things

You can now pick a tale right from the front page.

The homepage with the four tales listed, their languages, and page counts — Just a click away from reading

The tale, Vocabulary, and exercises pages had their data fetching improved so they open noticeably faster.

For learners of Russian, the difficulty selection now asks whether you would like help reading Cyrillic, and turns transliteration on for you if you say yes. And of course, you can turn it off or back on in the tale reading settings anytime.

The difficulty selection for a Russian tale, with the switch Want help reading Cyrillic? Show transliteration turned on — Cyrillic, with training wheels

A page of The Haunted Mansion with Russian words woven in, each followed by its transliteration in brackets — And this is what the training wheels look like

And as usual, this update brings a large number of smaller fixes and improvements in all corners of Quilingo.

Happy reading

Enjoy! It’s back to the workbenches for us.