I love this app! I needed a consistent way to practice listening to and reading German, but traditional sources required me to stop and look everything up. It was also hard to find interesting, adult reading material at my elementary/ middle school German reading level. This app’s texts are interesting enough. I like that there is breaking news incorporated into the app as well delivers by notification. I recommend adding guilty pleasure celebrity news and song lyrics as well! With the English text just below the German text, I can test myself to see how long I can go reading only the German until I really need to stop and check the English to ensure comprehension. I love that you can press and hold each word for translation and to hear the pronunciation. Selecting entire pieces of texts allows you to do the same. Please fix the app so that I can change the translation to my own translation because sometimes it’s wrong or sometimes I can word it better for my own memorizing. Requested improvements? At the moment, when you select text for translation or pronunciation, there’s a spinning processing wheel showing that feels like it’s not done working. Sometimes the app gets sticky and doesn’t let you select things or scroll down. Otherwise I Love love love! This will be a game changer for me to practice on my own when I’m not with a language partner or tutor.

The main purpose of this app receives 5 stars. It provides cultural stories and news stories for people to read. You can also have a story created for you based on your competency level, your desired length of story, and your preference for fiction or non fiction. You have the option to read it to yourself or have the app read it to you at your chosen speed in your target language. You can look up words you don’t know to get the definition and to save it to your glossary. You can also record yourself saying the word. Now to the 3 star downsides of the app. The app doesn’t work completely. There are supposed to be a vocab matching game where you can practice matching words between languages for that story. It opens to a blank screen. It has never worked. There is also no mechanism for spaced repetition of vocabulary that they add or you add yourself. This app would be amazing if they implemented a vocabulary review section like on the Busuu language app where it lists all the vocabulary and has sections for strong and weak vocabulary that you can choose to review so that you don’t forget with time. There’s also a bug where sometimes when you had a word tothe glossary that it adds multiple cards of the same word. The app is also a little clunky for language learners who are studying more than one language, especially for the glossary. It doesn’t always keep the languages straight. Also, when you record yourself there is no feedback as to the accuracy of what you’re saying. Some of these are bugs and some are ways they could improve to make a good app great. The stories are already great. Just build up the app infrastructure around them to be just as great.

It’s definitely the best app interface that I’ve seen for reading a language you are trying to learn. However, sometimes the stories feel like they are written by Chat GBT and the usage of the language can be a little off. For example for one French story they used the word “dirigeant” to represent a wooden ruler, but the word is meant to describe a person who is a leader/ruler not the object. I don’t mind the ChatGPT curated stories, however, I do wish someone who spoke the language reviewed and edited the material before it was published on the app. The stories aren’t long so it would not be difficult for someone to do. Also more content that is entertaining to read even though it is a short story would helpful. Just my suggestion. Otherwise I think it’s pretty good.**Update**I don’t think I’ve ever updated a review in the App Store. But I thought this was worth it. So what I said before, mostly still stands. However, they added a feature where you can create your own stories in a different language using AI. For me this knocks out the boring aspect that a lot of the short stories can have because you get to make up your own. Although I do think creating your own stories makes this app worth five stars. I also think that the stories that are published by the app should be reviewed by someone who knows the language. Also, maybe the stories can be more meaningful since people can now create their own with AI in the app. I just feel like now the app creators don’t have to push out stories all the time, allowing for the stories they publish to be more interesting and longer like the earlier ones.

This app is a literal game-changer. What completely sets this app apart from every other app is that instead of just learning a bunch of words and forgetting them, you learn words and get to keep reinforcing the knowledge by reading. However, there are a few things with the development that make the extra features of the app difficult or even unusable. For example, there is poor integration for users who are learning more than one language. I may want to review vocab I learned in Portuguese, but the app only shows me the words in Japanese(even if I only ever read the story in Portuguese, and have my preferences set to Portuguese). This makes it impossible to track your progression or do review in each language. Also, the post-story games just straight up don’t work. I love this app though, and the stories alone make it worth it for me to subscribe to premium. If they fix their app usability(and maybe change the name to something easy to say + therefore be promoted by word of mouth) this app will absolutely surpass Duolingo in popularity and functionality.