Disclosure, up front: we make Simply Fluent, which is one of the apps in this comparison. So read this with the appropriate scepticism. What we have tried to do is write the guide we wish existed when we started: one that says plainly what each app is good at, including the places where a competitor will serve you better than we will. There are several of those, and they are marked.
All prices and features below were checked in July 2026. Apps change. Kindle quietly removed a feature in 2024 that half the guides on the internet still describe as though it exists, which is a good reminder to check the date on anything you read about software, this article included.
What this article is about
There is a specific thing a lot of learners want, and it is surprisingly hard to buy: you want to read a real book in the language you're learning, understand what's happening, and not have to put the book down every twenty seconds to type a word into a translator.
That is a narrow need. It is not "learn Spanish." It is not "practise vocabulary." Duolingo will not do it. A textbook will not do it. What you want is a reading surface with a dictionary welded into it.
Several apps solve this. They solve it in genuinely different ways, and the differences matter more than the marketing suggests.
The short version
| App | What it really is | Price (July 2026) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| LingQ | A vocabulary system with a reader attached | €14.99/mo, €119.99/yr | Learners who want every word tracked, forever |
| Readlang | A browser extension that translates any web page | $6/mo, $48/yr | Reading the open web, not just books |
| Beelinguapp | Side-by-side parallel text with audio | $7.99/mo, $49.90/yr (App Store) | Absolute beginners (A1–A2) |
| Kindle | An e-reader with a dictionary | Books only, no subscription | Cheapest path if you own one already |
| Eppika | Bestsellers rewritten to your level | $49.99/yr (App Store) | People who find real novels too hard |
| Simply Fluent | Saved translations stay printed on the page, so you never look a word up twice | Free; €7.99/mo, €59.99/yr | Reading real books without stopping every line |
Now the part that matters: what each one is genuinely like.
LingQ
LingQ is the serious one, and it is the one most likely to beat us for a particular kind of person.
Its central idea is that vocabulary is the system, not a feature bolted on the side. Every word you meet is either known, unknown, or somewhere in between, and LingQ tracks that state across everything you ever read in it. Your statistics follow you. Words feed a spaced-repetition review queue. Over months, the app builds a genuinely detailed model of what you do and don't know.
If that idea appeals to you, if you want the app to be an accountant of your vocabulary, LingQ is better at it than we are, and you should probably use LingQ. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
The costs are real, though. It is the most expensive option here at €14.99/month (as of July 2026; LingQ prices vary by region, so check what it shows you). The free tier is tight: 20 saved words and 5 imports. And the interface carries a lot of history, there is a lot of app in front of the book.
Choose LingQ if: you want a complete vocabulary system and you'll use the review queue.
Readlang
Readlang's insight is that the book isn't the only thing you read.
It is primarily a browser extension. You install it, and then any web page in your target language becomes tappable, news articles, blogs, fan wikis, whatever you were already reading. Click a word, get a translation, save it. It also handles uploaded text.
That is a genuinely broader surface than a book app, and it's the reason to pick it. If most of your reading is on the open web rather than in novels, Readlang beats us and it isn't close.
At $6/month it's also the cheapest paid option here. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrase translations at 10 a day.
Choose Readlang if: you read articles and web pages more than books.
Beelinguapp
Beelinguapp does one thing that nothing else here does: it puts the two languages side by side, physically, with synced audio. Your language on one side, the target language on the other, and a voice reading along.
For a genuine beginner, this is easier than tap-to-translate, and we want to be honest about that. When you understand almost nothing, having the English right there, not one tap away, but right there, is less exhausting. At A1 and A2, Beelinguapp is a gentler place to start than we are.
The limits show up as you improve. It's a closed library: there's no way to bring your own book, so you're reading what Beelinguapp has, not the novel you wanted. Reviewers also report the story artwork, and possibly some of the text, being AI-generated, with translations that read like machine output.
On price, one oddity worth knowing: Beelinguapp publishes no pricing at all on its own website. The App Store listing shows $7.99/month and $49.90/year (July 2026), alongside a thicket of promotional tiers. If you sign up, check what you're being charged.
Choose Beelinguapp if: you're at the very beginning and parallel text sounds like a relief.
Kindle
Here is where most articles about this lie to you, so let's be precise, because we nearly got it wrong ourselves.
Kindle's Vocabulary Builder keeps one list across your entire library. Look a word up in one book, and it's there when you're reading a different book. Several competitors imply otherwise. They're wrong, and we're not going to repeat it just because it would flatter us.
Kindle is also, straightforwardly, the cheapest and most pleasant reading hardware in existence, with the largest bookstore in existence. If you own one, you already have a language-learning tool.
The genuine problems are specific:
- Word Wise is not a translation feature. It shows simple English synonyms above difficult English words, and Amazon built it for young readers and people learning English. It won't translate your Spanish novel into English, and no update will make it: it's monolingual by design. This catches people out constantly, because it looks exactly like the feature a learner wants.
- Vocabulary Builder only exists on Kindle e-reader hardware, not in the iOS or Android Kindle app. If you read on your phone, as a lot of people do, the feature isn't there.
- Amazon removed the Flashcards feature in late 2024. Review still exists; the flashcards do not. A lot of guides still describe them.
- There is no official way to export your word list.
Choose Kindle if: you already own one, you read on the device rather than your phone, and a dictionary lookup is all you need.
Eppika
Eppika takes real bestsellers and rewrites them to your level, A1 through C1. The book gets easier so you don't have to be better yet.
This solves a real problem. Authentic novels are hard, the gap between a graded reader and an actual novel is a cliff, and plenty of people fall off it.
We attack the same problem from a different angle: our modernized classics keep the book complete and faithful but rewrite the archaic language, so the difficulty you're removing is the century, not the story. Eppika removes difficulty by simplifying the prose to your level. If what you want is a recent, famous bestseller rather than Verne or Austen, Eppika does something we don't.
The trade-off is philosophical and worth being clear-eyed about: you are not reading the book the author wrote. You're reading a version of it. Whether that matters is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one, it depends what you want out of the experience.
Their App Store listing shows Premium Annual at $49.99 (July 2026). Reviewers note you can only select single words, not phrases.
Simply Fluent
Ours. Here is what it is, without the adjectives.
Simply Fluent exists because of a frustration, and it's worth stating plainly even though it's a subjective one. Having spent a long time in the apps above, the thing that bothered us was never a missing feature. It was that none of them felt good to read in. Clunky, busy, faintly confusing. Something between you and the page at all times: a panel to manage, a popup to dismiss, a counter going up, a screen catching up with your thumb. You could get through a book, but the software was always there.
That's a taste judgment, not a fact, and you're entitled to disagree with it. But it's the whole reason this app exists, so we'd rather say it out loud than bury it: we have tried very hard to make the reading itself feel good. Quiet, quick, uncluttered, pleasant to sit inside for an hour. If that sounds like a soft thing to optimise for, consider that the only reading app that works is the one you don't close.
Everything else follows from putting the reading first. Three things in particular.
The translation understands the sentence. Most dictionaries hand you every possible definition and leave you to guess which one applies. Tap a word here and you get the meaning that fits this sentence, and it catches expressions and idioms, the things that slip past a word-by-word lookup entirely and leave you confidently misreading a line.
You never look the same word up twice. Save a translation once and it's printed in small text in the line space above that word, from then on, on every page, in every book. You read atrapada with trapped sitting just above it. Nothing to tap, no popup to dismiss, no panel to close, nothing to wait for. Your eye takes in both and you keep moving. It's in your dictionary and your flashcards as well, but you don't have to go anywhere for the reading itself to get easier.
You decide when you're done with a word. When you know one, you mark it memorized, while reading, in your flashcards, or anywhere the translation shows up, and it stops appearing above the text. The word stays highlighted, so if it deserts you two hundred pages later you reveal the translation again with a tap. Nothing is taken away and nothing decides on your behalf that you've learned something. You say so, and you can always change your mind.
The effect over a few books is that the text is dense with small translations early on and progressively barer as you go, because you keep retiring words. The book turns back into just a book, at the rate you earn it. Saved words also become flashcards drawn from your own reading, weighted toward the ones you keep meeting, so review is built out of the book you were reading rather than a deck someone else wrote.
It reads aloud, too. Any page, adjustable speed, turning the pages by itself, and you can stop anywhere to translate a word and then carry on listening. It uses your device's own voices, and most phones now let you download high-quality neural voices for your target language from system settings, free, so you choose a voice you want to listen to. Because it's the device speaking, it will read any book you own, including your own imports, and it works offline. Apps built on recorded narration are limited to the handful of titles somebody paid a human to read.
The point of all of it is to get out of your way. A good session should end with you having read a chapter, not operated an app.
What you read. You can import your own EPUBs and PDFs, but you don't have to start there, and that's a distinction worth drawing. There's a built-in library of short stories and modernized classics: full-length works by Austen, Verne, Conan Doyle and others, complete and faithful to the originals, but with the archaic vocabulary and sentence structures rewritten into the language as it's written today. Not summarized, not abridged, not "adapted for learners". Modernized.
That solves a specific problem. Hugo's French is 160 years old, and Cervantes' Spanish is older; reaching for a classic in your target language usually means fighting the century as well as the language. This gives you the actual book without the archaeology.
It's free to start (no card), and €7.99/month or €59.99/year with a 30-day trial. That's roughly half of LingQ. Thirty-seven languages are fully supported; another ninety-odd work with translation tools.
Where we're genuinely not the right answer: we have a personal dictionary and flashcards, but we don't try to be an accountant. If you want known/unknown state on every word you've ever seen, with statistics tracking the curve, LingQ is more complete than we are. If you read the web more than books, Readlang is the better tool. If you specifically want contemporary bestsellers graded to your level, that's Eppika's thing, not ours. And if you already own a Kindle and only need a dictionary, you may not need to buy anything at all.
So which one?
By where you are right now:
- You've never read anything in this language. Beelinguapp, or a graded reader. Get used to the feeling first.
- Real novels are too hard, and it's demoralising. Eppika. Come back to unmodified books later.
- You want to read an actual novel and stop looking words up manually. Simply Fluent, or Kindle if you own one and read on it.
- You want your vocabulary tracked with real rigour. LingQ.
- You mostly read articles, not books. Readlang.
- You have no money. Kindle if you own one; otherwise the free tiers of Simply Fluent or Readlang will get you further than you'd expect.
The honest meta-point: the app matters much less than whether you read. Every tool here works. The one that works for you is the one that stops you closing the book. If a free option gets you reading forty pages a week, it is beating a paid one that gets you reading four.
A few questions people ask
Is reading a good way to learn a language?
For vocabulary and grammar intuition, it's one of the best things you can do, you meet words repeatedly, in context, which is how they stick. It will not, on its own, teach you to speak. Reading builds the raw material; speaking requires speaking.
Can I just use Google Translate?
You can, and it's miserable. Copying each word out breaks the reading. The whole point of these apps is removing that friction, not translating better, but translating without stopping.
What if the book is too hard?
Pick an easier book. This is the single most common mistake, and the most fixable. If you're looking up more than a word or two per sentence, you're decoding, not reading, and it won't stick. How to pick your first book goes into this properly, as does knowing when to level up.
Do I need to understand every word?
No, and trying to will make you quit. You don't have to understand everything.
