Beletria went live this week. It is a small, free app for learning German or French the way most people who actually learned a language did it: by reading books they wanted to read, with a dictionary within reach.
What it does
You pick a book from the public domain. Fairy tales by the Grimms, if you are starting; Dumas or Verne, if you are not. The app shows it to you one sentence at a time, in the original. Tap a word and you get what it means in that sentence. Flip the translation to check yourself. Ask for a short note on the grammar the sentence is using. Press play to hear it read aloud. Save the words you want to keep, and train them later.
Nothing is simplified. Nothing is generated while you wait. Every sentence is prepared, checked and cached before a book reaches the shelf, so reading feels like reading, not like waiting for a model.
Why
I wanted to read Le Comte de Monte-Cristo in French and kept giving up around page four, because every paragraph meant six trips to a dictionary and the story could not survive that. Graded readers were dull. Apps taught me to order coffee. Neither got me to page five.
What worked, in the end, was a friend sitting next to me who would answer "what does that word mean here?" without a lecture. Beletria is an attempt to put that friend into a phone, for every book that belongs to everyone.
What this blog is for
Short posts, roughly when something happens: a new book on the shelf, a change worth explaining, a look at how a piece of it is built, and the occasional note on what reading does for a language that drills do not. If you would rather not check back, there is an RSS feed.
The app is at app.beletria.com. It is free, there are no ads, and the first sentence of a fairy tale is waiting.