Learn English by reading
Tsukigo is a free app for learning English by reading. You read short stories at your level, hear them read aloud, and tap any word you don't know.
What you read
Around a thousand English stories: conversations between two people, everyday scenes, culture and ideas, jokes, and the nursery rhymes and children's verse English-speaking children learn before they can read.
Every story is recorded, and the text lights up word by word as the audio plays. Here is one of them, in full.
The Machine in the Corner
The laundromat on Valencia Street is always too warm. I was folding my shirts when the machine in the corner started to shake.
A woman ran over and hit it twice. It stopped.
“It does that,” I said. “You have to be nice to it.”
She laughed. “Nobody told me the rules.”
We waited together. She was new to the city, but I'd been here six years. I told her which machines eat your quarters and which ones don't.
When her clothes were dry, she said thanks and left.
I didn't get her name. But that night the laundromat felt a little less lonely.
Word meanings come in the language you already speak, so pick yours at the top of this page. They show only where you need them: Tsukigo leaves them off words you already know and keeps them on the ones you're still learning. You can show them on every word instead, or turn them off.
You don't have to choose a level. After a few stories, Tsukigo knows which words you've met, and the stories it suggests next are built mostly from those.
Practicing words
You can save any word you tap, and saved words get their own list under Vocabulary. To go over them outside the stories, practice takes you through them one at a time.
If you are starting out
The starter course begins with words rather than letters: basic vocabulary, taught through purpose-built exercises.
bread
cat
read
run
three
under
What is the woman doing?
The woman is cooking.
After that come scenes, then short stories you can read with what the course has taught you.
Going further
We are still adding to the catalog, and the hardest material is the thinnest part of it. English is also the easiest language in the world to find real material in, and at some point books, the news, films and conversations with real people will take you further than anything we could grade for you. If there is something you want to read and cannot find, tell us.