Simply Fluent 2.0 is out today. It is the same idea it always was: you read a book in the language you're learning, you translate the words you don't know without leaving the page, and a word you save shows its meaning above it in every book you read after that. Almost everything around that idea is new.

This post is about what changed, and why I spent most of this year rebuilding an app that already existed.

Why I rebuilt it

I started Simply Fluent in 2018, while I was learning Dutch. I wasn't much of a language learner. I did the usual things: over a year and a half of Duolingo, a few other apps, evening classes, some meetups. It all got me to a certain point, and then I stopped making progress. None of it was fun enough to keep me going, and I couldn't work out what the next step was supposed to be.

So I tried something different. I wanted to read a book in Dutch, and I started Harry Potter with the paper book in one hand and Google Translate on my phone in the other. Every word I didn't know meant unlocking the phone, typing the word, spelling it right and finding my place on the page again. Then I'd look up the same word a page later, because I hadn't kept it. I gave up after a couple of pages. Nothing in 2018 made this easy, so I built the reader I wanted.

Then something happened that I didn't expect. Building the app took all my free time, so I had no time left to study Dutch. But every evening I read a few pages to test the latest version and find bugs. After a while, the reading was the reason I opened it: I finished my first book in Dutch, then another, then a whole stack of them. Then I went on a walking tour given entirely in Dutch, and I understood it. I could watch films without subtitles. The app had no audio yet, so all I had done was read. Later I learned Spanish and Portuguese the same way, this time on purpose.

The first version that reached the app stores wasn't good enough. I wasn't happy with it, and the people using it weren't either. It was buggy. I was one person building the app and marketing it at the same time, and after launch I was always rushing to keep up, adding whatever people asked for. The app was losing its shape.

I also made a mistake that had nothing to do with code. I stayed anonymous. I talked to people and tested the app with them in person, but I never put my name on it and never built a place where the people using it could reach me. That made it hard to know what was working.

So in February I stopped adding things. I took screenshots of every screen in the old app, more than a hundred of them, and redesigned all of them, from the first screen you see to the last setting in the reader. I wasn't happy with the result, so I redesigned the style again, and then a third time before it felt right. Then I rebuilt the app on top of that design. 2.0 is not an update to the old app. It's a new app with the same name and the same idea. And this time it has my name on it.

What's new

A new reader

The reader is where you spend almost all of your time, so it got the most work. It's been rebuilt from scratch, and it can do a lot that the old one couldn't:

Translations use the sentences around the word, not only the sentence it sits in, so the meaning you see fits the story better.
You can select a phrase across a page turn. If an expression starts at the bottom of one page and ends at the top of the next, you can translate it as one.
A dyslexia-friendly font. I wanted to add one for a long time, but the way the old app was built made it hard. In the new reader it's one setting.
Text size and line spacing, so you can set the page up the way it's comfortable for you to read.
Three reader themes: Dark, Classic and Light. The old app only had dark.

Everything that made the reader worth using is still there. Select a word and you get the meaning it has in this sentence, with expressions and idioms detected as a whole. Save it, and it's shown above the word on every page after that. When you know a word, mark it memorized: the translation is hidden, the word stays highlighted, and you can still open it if you need it again.

Flashcards, rebuilt

The flashcards are new. You swipe through them, each book gets its own deck, and the words you save while reading are scheduled with spaced repetition.

A place to start from zero

Simply Fluent has always been a reading app, and it still is. But you need to know some words before a page makes sense, and if the language uses another alphabet, you need to be able to read the letters first. For my own Spanish, I spent the first weeks learning words somewhere else before I could open a book.

2.0 has a place for that. Script courses teach you the writing system a few letters at a time, for Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Ukrainian and Korean. Your first 100 words teaches the words that turn up on nearly every page.

Streaks, stats and achievements, if you want them

I held off on this one for a long time. I wanted streaks, but I didn't want Simply Fluent to become a gamified app that you open to keep a number going more than to learn anything.

But several people asked me for streaks, some of them in person, and it's not up to me to decide how you like to keep yourself going. So 2.0 has them, along with achievements and a statistics screen that shows the words you've read, saved and memorized, the pages you've read and the hours behind them. Flashcards and lessons count toward your streak, not only reading.

I've kept them in the background. The reading is still the center of the app, and nothing about it depends on them. They're there to show you what you've done, and if you don't care about them, you can ignore them.

There's one small extra, just for fun. If you're coming from another app where you've built up a streak, you can bring it with you: take a screenshot of it, and Simply Fluent reads the number off it and carries the days over. Read here that day or the next, and your streak continues from there. You can only do this once, and if you miss a day after that, the carried days are gone for good. They also don't count toward achievements.

I added it because moving away from an app you've opened every day for years is hard enough, and starting again at zero makes it harder. A streak isn't about the app you kept it in. It's how many days in a row you've been learning a language, and that belongs to you, wherever you learn.

A new start

The first thing you do in 2.0 is read. Before you create an account, the app gives you a short passage in the language you picked, so you can see how it works on a page instead of reading a description of it.

How pricing works now

This is the change I thought about longest.

In the old app, the free version had daily limits: separate counters for translations and insights, each resetting every day. Daily counters push you to count your lookups. Someone who is rationing lookups is not reading, and reading is the whole reason the app exists.

So the daily limits are gone. Now it works like this:

Everyone starts with 30 days of Premium. Cancel before it ends and you aren't charged.
If you don't subscribe, the app keeps working. Your saved words, flashcards and stats all stay. The library, read-aloud and offline reading stay. You get 150 translations and insights that don't reset, one book of your own, and more translations when you invite friends.
Premium is €7.99 a month or €59.99 a year. It gives you unlimited translations and insights, as many books of your own as you like (PDF included), up to 15 words in one selection, and daily reading goals and challenges.

If you had an account in the old app, it starts 2.0 with a larger allowance than a new one.

What didn't change

The library still has short stories and Modernized Classics: complete classics with old-fashioned language rewritten the way people write today, in 45 languages. Read-aloud still turns the page for you. Every word you saved in the old app is still yours.

The goal is still the same. I want Simply Fluent to get you reading sooner, so that one day you can pick up a book in a library, in the language you've been learning, and not need the app at all.

Thank you

Some of you have been here since the first version, the buggy one. You sent in bug reports and requests about what was broken and what was missing, and a lot of 2.0 exists because you did. Thank you.

If something in 2.0 doesn't work the way you expect, or you want something that isn't there yet, tell me. I read everything.

And if you want to talk about what you're reading, ask questions or just hang out with me and other readers, come and join us on Discord.

Marco

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Simply Fluent 2.0: Rebuilt From the Ground Up