How to use Readlang: a practical tutorial from the first text to the flashcards

Step 1: Create the account and choose a language

Sign up at readlang.com; the free plan asks for no card. The first screens ask which language you are learning and which language the translations should come in. Readlang lists more than a hundred languages, 58 of them added in June 2024, and the AI explanations cover all of them.

You can add more languages later, and one Premium subscription covers all of them, so pick the one you will actually read this week.

The page you land on after signing in is the library: your own texts, once you add some, and the shared library for your language. Adding some is the next step.

Step 2: Find something to read

Readlang does not supply a course, so the material is yours to bring. Five ways in, in rough order of effort.

• The shared library. Filter by your language and pick something that looks slightly too hard. For popular languages there is a fair amount; for beginners in less common languages it can be thin, the most frequent complaint about Readlang and a fair one.
• Paste text. Any text from anywhere; give it a title and it becomes a text in your library.
• Upload an EPUB. DRM-free EPUB files upload as books. Kindle purchases carry DRM and cannot be uploaded; public-domain books and DRM-free stores work. PDF is not listed among the upload formats on the pages we checked.
• The Web Reader. The browser extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox makes any live page clickable and can import its text into the library. Install steps for every browser, including the Safari bookmarklet, are on the extension page.
• YouTube. Paste a video link and Readlang imports it with its transcript, then plays the video with the transcript following along, every word clickable. Some transcripts arrive as a single paragraph, a complaint on the forum in 2026; worth knowing before importing a two-hour lecture.

Level matters more than source. A text where you know nine words in ten is a reading session; a text where you know six in ten is a dictionary session, and those do not get finished.

Step 3: Read, click, select

Open the text. Click a word and the translation appears in place, without leaving the page. The word is saved to your list automatically; there is no separate add step. Single-word translations are unlimited on every plan.

For a phrase, select from the first word to the last and Readlang translates the run as one unit. This is where the plans differ: the free plan allows ten phrase translations a day of up to six words each; Premium removes the daily limit and stretches a phrase to twelve words. The tenth phrase of the day is where the free plan makes itself felt, so spend phrases on idioms and separable verbs, not on runs of words you could click one by one.

When a translation looks wrong, or right but unhelpful, there are two tools. The AI context explanation asks a GPT-4o mini model (GPT-4o on Premium Plus) what the word or idiom means in this sentence; the free plan gives ten a day, Premium unlimited. The popup dictionary is configurable, so if you prefer a specific monolingual dictionary or a particular bilingual one, set it once in the settings and every lookup uses it.

Two settings notes. The pricing page lists a cap on word highlighting for the free plan, 200 words in total. And if you are looking for a dark mode, it is not mentioned on the pricing or features pages we checked; the forum is the place to ask.

Step 4: Flashcards the next day

Every word you clicked is now a flashcard. Readlang schedules them with spaced repetition and orders them by frequency in the language, so the words that will come up in your next text come up in your review first, and the rare ones wait. You do not choose which cards to study; the queue does.

The nudge is a daily reminder email. There is a streak, and the free plan gives no streak repairs while Premium gives two a month; treat it as a habit tracker rather than a scoreboard.

On Premium you can practice from a specific book, which is useful the evening before you carry on reading it. Readlang does not prescribe a number of cards a day on the pages we checked; ten minutes of the queue keeps up with a chapter a day, and daily matters more than long.

Step 5: The vocabulary manager and export

The vocabulary manager is where every clicked word lives with its translation and the sentence it came from; it is also the part of Readlang you can take with you.

Export goes out as CSV, with translation and context, and that CSV is how people get their Readlang words into Anki: there is no one-click Anki export, and a forum guide from June 2024 shows how to turn the file into cloze cards. There is no import in the other direction; a CSV from another tool cannot be loaded into Readlang, a request that has been open since 2024. The Anki export page has the steps and the things that trip people up, such as exporting only the words added since last time, which Readlang does not do automatically.

Step 6: Audio

Three separate things get called audio in Readlang, and they sit on different plans.

• Read Aloud with browser voices. Free; the quality is whatever voices your browser and operating system provide, so it varies by browser.
• Readlang voices. Higher-quality voices for words and phrases on Premium, and for whole texts on Premium Plus.
• Uploaded audio. On Premium you can upload your own audio, an audiobook chapter or a podcast episode, and Readlang transcribes it, for around sixty languages. Storage is 10 hours on Premium and 200 on Premium Plus; the free plan has none.

If listening while reading is what you want, the upload feature is the reason to pay; check that your language is among the sixty first.

Step 7: Using it on a phone

There is no Readlang app in the App Store or on Google Play. The official route, described on the forum in June 2024, is to open readlang.com in Safari or Chrome and add it to the home screen, which runs the site full screen. Everything above works there. Live web pages are the exception: Safari on iOS has no extension and needs the bookmarklet; on Android, Firefox can install the Firefox extension and is the easiest route.

Two limits to know before relying on it. Nothing works offline, since every translation is a server request; the offline page explains what people do about it. And the experience is a website: adequate, not native. The iPhone page and the Android page go through the setup and the rough edges on each.

Common mistakes

Three habits that make people conclude the method does not work, when it is the habit that does not.

1. Looking words up somewhere else. Opening a translator in another tab, or a paper dictionary, means the word never gets saved and never reaches the flashcard queue. Click it in Readlang even when you half know it; the queue is the point.
2. Importing texts far above your level. The novel you want to read is rarely the novel you can read. Start with something where a page has a handful of unknowns, not a handful of knowns: graded material or news in short paragraphs before literature.
3. Skipping the review. The reading is pleasant and the flashcards are not, so they get skipped, and the same words get clicked again next week. Spaced repetition only works when it is fed daily. Ten minutes, before the next text.

A fourth, smaller one: treating the phrase limit as a bug. It is the design of the free plan. Budget the ten phrases or pay the six dollars.

The same method on an iPhone, with Readlang Mobile

We make Readlang Mobile, and this section is the disclosure: an independent native iOS app, not affiliated with Readlang, for iPhone and iPad on iOS 18 and later. It follows the method above with a phone in mind.

• The library is graded, A1 to C1, with public-domain books; some come with audiobooks that highlight the word being read while you tap for translations without stopping playback.
• Tap a word for the translation in place. For a phrase, tap its first word and its last word; no dragging to select on a small screen.
• Translation comes from Google Translate through the app's server by default. Without a connection the app switches to Apple Translate, which translates on the device if the language pack for your pair is downloaded; a book has to be opened online once.
• Translated words are saved automatically; practice with them is on Premium. Articles come in by pasting a link; your own EPUBs on Premium.

What it does not do, so the choice is honest: no browser extension, no YouTube import, no Anki or CSV export, no Android version, and about twenty languages instead of a hundred, the ones Apple Translation handles on the device, with Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Arabic among them. Free for 30 translations a day; Premium is $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year through the App Store.

Questions people ask