Take a picture of a book page in English, French, German or Italian, and Lexiglo annotates it for you as a language learner. Tap any word for a translation, grammar and cross-references, then study vocabulary with flashcards and spaced repetition. Out for iPhone now (& for Android if you sign up for the closed test).

I've used many (so many) different language learning tools over the years to study a range of languages. But one of the most enjoyable ways for me personally to improve my fluency and vocabulary in a language is fairly low tech - I simply read books in that language. I had a workflow where I would have my phone sitting next to the (paper) book I was reading with a translation app (DeepL) and a flashcard app (Anki) to look up words I didn't know and add them to a flashcard to study if I deemed them useful enough to remember. There was no dedicated tool to support this workflow, so I developed Lexiglo as a side project. I've been using it for several months now and it works really well for me, but I'm maybe weird in that I do really like reading on paper and I much prefer a long, meaty text to learn from rather than simplistic content optimised for language learners. From a technical point of view, one of the hardest parts was enabling the move from paper to digital in a smooth way. Even though iOS and Android come with decent OCR capabilities out of the box, they do a surprisingly poor job at extracting the contiguous text from a picture of a book page. I ended up developing a dedicated cross-platform library for that (open sourced as BookSnap).

This is such a useful idea for anyone learning through real reading. One thing I'd love to see is the ability to save whole sentences or phrases, not just single words, so you can review them later with audio playback. That would make it feel more like a complete study tool rather than just a dictionary.

Finally an app that actually uses the books I already own instead of locking vocabulary behind a paywall. The tap-to-translate with grammar notes feels smoother than Google Translate on dense pages.

Lexiglo

The multilingual companion for serious readers

The multilingual companion for serious readers