We’re live!

After many months of planning, preparation, writing, translating, text processing, designing, coding, and countless rounds of iterations that sometimes sent us right back to the drawing board, we’ve finally reached our first big milestone! At last, we’re ready to show the world what we have been working on.

There’s a common belief among the folk that mindless, boring, soul-crushing drilling of nonsensical words, phrases, and sentences out of context is the only way to properly learn a foreign language.

We beg to differ.

We believe that language is best learned not by drilling, but by immersion — by spending time within a story and letting the words come to you. The best and most efficient learning happens in the moments when subject matter, sufficient context, and fun meet. Today we open the doors of Quilingo so you can do exactly that.

Here is the whole method, honestly stated: you read a tale in English (or the reverse as Quilingo works both ways!), and as you read, words and phrases of the language you’re learning, be it Castilian Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, or Russian, appear woven into the text. The story around them makes their meaning plain, so your brain does what brains do best: it notices, connects, and keeps. And should the context ever leave you guessing, hover over any foreign lexical unit (or tap on touchscreen) and a quiet tooltip hands you the translation. No flashcards. No drills. No owl with an agenda (except in Trouble in the Forest, there we do, in fact, have one owl with an agenda).

You choose how bold to be. Five difficulty levels run from a gentle word here and there to a text that has mostly stopped pretending to be English, and you can change your mind at any time.

And the difficulty dial is not the only one. The reading settings let you choose how foreign words are highlighted (all of them, only the newcomers, or none) summon or dismiss the tooltips, hide the illustrations, and even flip the whole tale into bilingual mode, with the full text in both languages, whenever you feel like simply reading for a while.

Every word and phrase you meet is kept for you in your Vocabulary, together with the place you first met it, because words, like people, are easier to remember when you recall where you were introduced. The Vocabulary page holds your whole collection, ready to be revisited whenever you please. And should a translation ever strike you as odd, every entry carries a small report button. We read each and every report, and our translators take them seriously.

The tales themselves are original and written with love: cozy, light-hearted adventures with quirky characters and gentle mysteries, translated by professional translators who live the languages and not by machines.

And because we would rather you try it than take our word for it: the first pages of every tale are free, no registration required. Come in, pick the language you speak, pick the one you wish to learn, and start reading.

“Is this all?” you may ask. And to that we can answer a resolute “No!” This is not all. There will be more in the (hopefully) near future. We will be adding more tales, more languages (with not just English as the centerpiece), more features. We’re hard at work to bring you more, so stay with us.

Welcome to Quilingo.