Featured by Apple on the App Store
Book by book, you go from looking up every other word to reading whole pages without stopping.
This is the same reader as in the app. Select a word you don't know and save its translation. Then turn to the next page and look for that word.
The library has books in each of the languages listed below. Translation works in 134 languages, so you can also import your own books in languages that have no library books. See the full list of languages.
El tren llegó a la ciudad poco después del amanecer. Clara bajó al andén con una maleta pequeña y un libro viejo bajo el brazo. No conocía a nadie, pero no tenía miedo.
Compró un café en la estación y se sentó junto a la ventana. Afuera, la ciudad empezaba a despertar: una persiana que subía, un tranvía, dos vecinos que discutían sobre el tiempo. De repente se dio cuenta de que entendía casi todo lo que decían.
"It's too hard to read in the language I'm learning."
Select a word or phrase you don't know and you get all its meanings, with the one that fits the sentence highlighted. You don't leave the book, and you don't have to guess which meaning is right.
"I have to start with children's books."
Bring your own book, or pick a short story or a full-length classic at your level.
"I don't have time to sit down and read."
Any book can be read aloud with your phone's own voice, including the ones you add yourself, at the speed you choose and without a connection. Turn on Pages follow the audio and reading continues on the next page, so you can listen on the bus and keep your place.
"I can't learn a language on my own."
Translations you save come back as flashcards. Your stats show the words you have read, the translations you have saved and memorized, and the hours behind them. Streaks are there if you want them.
Researchers have measured how many words it takes to read a book, and how people learn them. Here is what they found, and where Simply Fluent fits in.
A word family is a word with its related forms, like read, reader and reading. UK school learners of French finish their GCSE knowing fewer than 1,000 French words, and finish A-level with about 2,000.
School figures count single words. A word family holds one or more of them, so the real gap is wider than the chart shows.
Adult learners read a short story in which some words had been replaced with words they couldn't know. The more of the story's words a group knew, the more readers in that group understood the story.
Each group had 16 or 17 readers, and understanding meant getting at least 12 of 14 questions about the story right. A page is counted as 300 words. The researchers estimate that reading without help starts at about 98%: around 6 unknown words on a page.
A reader who knows the 2,000 most common word families knows about 88% of the words in a novel, which leaves more than 30 unknown words on every page.
In one study, learners reading a story remembered more new words when the meaning was printed beside the word than when they had a dictionary or no help.
In Simply Fluent, you translate a word or phrase you don't know and see the meaning it has in that sentence. Save the translation, and it is shown above that word or phrase every time it comes back, in every book you read in that language, so a page with 30 unknown words is one you can still read.
The common words come back on every page, so you meet them again and again in your first books. Rarer words take more reading. Paul Nation estimated how many novels it takes to meet each word at least 12 times, one band of 1,000 word families at a time.
Each bar is one band of 1,000 word families, from the 2nd thousand most common to the 9th.
A word you learn in one book is a word you know in every book after it, so the next book has fewer unknown words on each page. By Nation's figures, reading an hour and 40 minutes a day, five days a week, at 150 words a minute, adds up to about 3 million words in 40 weeks: enough to meet the 9th thousand words 12 times each.
In rural Fiji, primary schools learning English were given 250 storybooks each. Children aged about 9 to 11 read them in class, in place of part of the usual English course, with no extra time spent on English.
Year 4 pupils. After two years, vocabulary scores in the storybook schools were about 10% higher.
Nation, I.S.P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1). Milton, J. (2006). Language Lite? Learning French vocabulary in school. Journal of French Language Studies, 16(2). Milton, J. (2013). Measuring the contribution of vocabulary knowledge to proficiency in the four skills. EUROSLA Monographs, 2. Hu, M. & Nation, P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1). Hulstijn, J., Hollander, M. & Greidanus, T. (1996). Incidental vocabulary learning by advanced foreign language students. The Modern Language Journal, 80(3). Nation, P. (2014). How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words? Reading in a Foreign Language, 26(2). Elley, W., Cutting, B., Mangubhai, F. & Hugo, C. (1996). Lifting Literacy Levels with Story Books. Elley, W. (1997). In Praise of Incidental Learning.
“I started building Simply Fluent in 2018, because I wanted to read a book in Dutch. I stopped having time to learn Dutch, but I would read a few pages every night to test the app. Then one day everyone around me was speaking Dutch, and I understood almost all of it, just from reading.”
Five-star reviews from the App Store and Google Play, as they were written.
Simply Fluent
I come from the streak land of Duolingo, but felt like I hit a plateau in learning and then your goal is just the streak as opposed to learning. With SimplyFluent you become more invested in learning since you’re trying to understand a story. The dictionary is a great to build your exposure to the words you don’t know. Definitely recommend this app.I love reading. That’s how I became fluent in english and french. I’m currently learning german and needed a tool to help me translate my german books in french without having to use a dictionary or a translating app. I love how the words you save are getting memorized so that when you come upon one the translation is already there and you understand easily. This is the first time that I pay for an app ever because it simply deserves it. You can also import your own books and read them.This is a great application for improving both reading level in a language, and with text to speech can also be used to improve one's ear for the language. of course vocabulary as well. They reached out to me for feedback and personally helped me with some issues I was having, which was a very positive experience.Simply Fluent makes learning through reading incredibly easy and enjoyable. I especially love that the books are organised by language level, as finding the right books when starting a new language is usually frustrating, but this app removes that problem completely. The whole experience feels very smooth and intuitive. The daily challenges helped me to build a consistent learning habit. Highly recommended for anyone learning/wanting to learn a new language!I’ve started using simply fluent and what can I say, it’s simply effective. Reading helps me keep my Spanish while simultaneously learning new vocabulary and I absolutely love it. 10/10 recommend!I have been learning languages ever since I can remember and speak 3 fluently. Simply Fluent is clearly the best I tried so far - reading is the best way to fully embrace any new language and the UX is designed in a way that makes it really pleasant to go back regularly.I’ve been using this app for a few weeks now and it is great.I love reading and I’m also learning Spanish so it’s the perfect combo. You can translate words you don’t know and then memorise them later with a flash card game. Highly recommendI love the way this app works, so easy to read and translate new words into any language!Start the 30-day Premium trial on this website or in the app. To use the free version, download the app and choose it during setup. Cancel the trial before it ends and you aren't charged.
Yes. Free flashcard decks help you learn the first 100 words of a language, so you can start before you can read a page. For English speakers they cover French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, Hebrew and Russian, and more languages are being added. If the language uses an alphabet you don't know yet, a free course helps you learn the letters for Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Ukrainian and Korean. After that, start with the short stories in the library.
The library has books and short stories in 45 languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. Translation works in 134 languages, so you can read your own books in 89 more. See every language.
Yes. Add EPUB, TXT or Markdown files, or paste in text. PDF needs Premium. Books with copy protection (DRM) can't be added. The free plan includes one book of your own in total, and Premium has no limit.
Yes. The app gives you instructions to send to ChatGPT, Claude or another assistant. The assistant asks what the story should be about, which language, how hard and how long, then writes it as a file. Import the file, or paste the text, and read it like any other book.
If you keep the subscription, your chosen monthly or yearly plan begins at the price shown. If you cancel the trial before it ends, you aren't charged. You can keep reading in the app on the free version, with every saved translation, flashcard and statistic intact. New translations and insights use your one-time allowance of 150 lookups. Trial lookups don't use it.
Yes. A book you have opened stays on your phone, and your saved translations are shown without a connection. Translating something new needs a connection, so choose Look up later in the translation card. When you're back online and open Home, the app translates everything you marked Look up later, and you choose which translations to keep.
Books in 45 languages, and 30 days of Premium for everyone.
