Built after the plateau, by a learner still climbing

I built Apilingual because I needed it.

I'm a solo developer, and I'm learning three languages at once — German, Danish, and Spanish. Not for a certificate or a job. For the ordinary reason: I wanted to read the books, follow the podcasts, and understand the conversations happening around me.

For a while the beginner apps carried me. I collected streaks, learned the colors and the food words and the present tense, and felt like I was getting somewhere. Then I opened a real book and understood almost nothing. The gap between the tidy sentences an app feeds you and the language people actually write and speak turned out to be enormous — and nothing on my phone was built to cross it.

That's the intermediate plateau, and it's where most learners quietly give up. I nearly did too. What kept me going wasn't another app promising fluency in three months; it was the slow, unglamorous thing language research has pointed to for decades — reading and listening to real material, a little above your level, in volume, with a way to look up what you don't know and actually remember it later.

The tooling for that barely existed, so I made it. Apilingual turns the things I genuinely want to read — an ebook, an article, a podcast, a video — into a lesson where every word is one tap from understood and one tap from tracked. It keeps an honest count of the words I know, and it brings them back for practice right when I'm about to forget them. It's the tool I wished I'd had when I was staring at that first real book.

I still use it every day, in all three languages. That's the short version of why it exists: it's built by a learner who hit the same wall you did, for learners the other apps left behind.

If you try it, I'd genuinely like to hear how it goes — what worked, what didn't, what's missing. You can reach me directly at [email protected].