—Arthur —dijo con tono cortante, ["Arthur," he said sharply.] y su voz sonó como el chasquido de una ratonera—, [and his voice sounded like the click of a mousetrap.]

There is zero gamification, as it's not needed - you're motivated by the pleasure of reading.

It won't help you to learn to speak (there is an option to read aloud a selected phrase though), but it will help you with vocabulary. I went with it from not being able to read even one page, to being able to understand 70% of a book (intermediate Spanish level) in about a month.

ATM looking for beta users, completely free of charge. Pls leave a contact in a comment if you're interested

I can probably add a new category for this and have it as a new filter.

I've tried Readlang briefly and thought the look of the site was much nicer than the clunky interface sported by LingQ, but I still didn't feel ready to make free reading a major part of my study as a ~B1+ self-learner of Spanish. Most texts for natives, even children's books like Harry Potter, are still very slow/difficult to read at my current level.

Import tools are nice, but the content I stumble on is often too hard for me to read efficiently. What I really need is help finding stuff I like that is only ~5% unknown words so I can read more fluidly/enjoyably. I'm not sure how to tackle the problem, but if you can crack the content discovery nut it will make the tool more accessible to lower level language students at the "widest" portion of the language learning funnel.

Another thing I've noticed is that Readlang seems very "quiet". Other platforms like Duolingo and LingQ have active user forums where people can share their experiences and problems. It'd be nice to have a discussion place to swap suggestions, get encouragement, and (most important) see testimonials/success stories.

Anyway, good luck. I hope the product is still around when I'm more advanced and ready to make reading a bigger part of my study.

In my experience, at the beginner level the most important thing is getting a good grasp on phonics and learning some vocabulary. But once a student is even lower intermediate it's a way better to spend time doing Extensive Reading instead of vocab drills. Extensive Reading—reading that is easy enough no dictionary is needed—is still great for building vocabulary, and it teaches colocations, grammar and the target language's culture, too. As ER builds up vocabulary, more and more radio and podcasts become comprehensible. In the long run, lots and lots of input (both reading and listening) and opportunities to use the language extemporaneously in real life is pretty much assured to lead to full bilingual proficiency.

The interesting thing about this app, is it just might allow students to transition from more formal study and into Extensive Reading at an earlier point than they otherwise would. The risk is that students would continue choosing books with a lot of words they don't understand and rob themselves of actually "reading" in its natural sense.

I tried Duolingo back before the pandemic was trendy, for maybe a year or so, to keep that streak going.

While I don't really feel that it was teaching me very well, I can relay this single anecdote. Duolingo has these stories that it figures you can read, based on the level of your scores. While reading a very short story in Spanish, I had the experience of the first time, a second language making me laugh because what I was reading, was funny. Nothing during my five years of 8th-12th grade did that. Just sharing, it's not meant to mean anything.

I definitely didn't see what I expected when opening a book for the first time -- I can already read or watch content in Italian. What I do today is pause (or stop reading) when I encounter a word I don't know.

What I expected when picking a level was definitely to see all Italian, though in retrospect I can imagine it's near impossible to do that without lots of paraphrasing.

But to me personally (much as I think this space needs more things, and that you OP are awesome for sharing it) that I'd not personally use something which wasn't entirely in my target language, as I find the way I've learned languages best so far to be similar to my current workflow, and over time I have to look up fewer and fewer words.

Duolingo has mini-stories, at least for Spanish, and has had them for a while.

They're usually around something happening to a bunch of characters. In most of the recent stories, there is a larger group of characters who all know each other and have interconnected "adventures".

The lessons then become not just translating random, out of context sentences, but listening to the story and answering contextual questions. They do seem fairly basic, but I think the basic idea is already there, it should only be improved.

It's mediocre at teaching you how to write, bad at teaching you to listen, and useless at teaching you how to speak.

I've found that if you just grind through lessons without actually reading the supporting material, you don't learn much at all. If you actually read the supporting material you'll learn a lot more.

Duolingo is best used as a tool in a toolbox of language learning tools. It's good for reinforcement learning, but not great for actually developing an understanding.

As an analogy, you could learn algebra by looking at a lot of examples and working through worksheets of algebra problems, but you're not going to actually understand what you're doing, or learn very well.

I think it's too dramatic to say it's a "real problem" with it! Anybody who intends to become fluent in a language is going to need to practice actually speaking and writing.

However, if I'd become too bored to do Duolingo, I'd progress on something a bit harder like reading gossip magazines (they use simple language and have emotionally charged content, which makes it an easy read).

My problem with Duolingo ambiguity is that if you want to do language learning on Duolingo starting from the middle rather than at the beginning, you'll get a lot of questions wrong because you're not familiar with the exact vocabulary that Duolingo wants you to know (i.e. what it taught you in earlier lessons.) Since it's constant translation drills, it builds up its own internal conventions about what English word translates to what target language word that you don't know as someone who has learned from other sources.

I've found translation to be a dead end for me. If I don't know a Spanish word I look it up in a Spanish language dictionary and/or thesaurus, and if I can't manage to figure it out using that and context, then I'll finally look for an English translation of the word. Totally there for English language grammar instruction, but not translation.