ReadBilingual started with a small embarrassment. After a couple of years of Chinese on my phone, a long streak, a vocabulary the app called intermediate, I sat down with a children's book and couldn't read it. I knew most of the characters on the page. I couldn't read the page.
Chinese makes that gap brutal. You can know a character on its own and still lose it in a sentence, because the meaning lives in the pairs it forms and in the rhythm of the line, and no flashcard shows you those. What does is reading. A lot of it, at a level where you can follow most of the page and guess the rest.
“We acquire language in only one way: when we understand messages slightly beyond our current level.”
Stephen Krashen, 1985
The catch is that books at that level barely exist. Graded readers for Chinese are out there and some are good, but they run out fast and they don't know which words you already have. Children's books use characters no course teaches in the first year. Native fiction is a wall when half the page is new.
A library that meets you where you are
So I'm building ReadBilingual. Tell it your level, or let it work that out from the words you've learned. It gives you a story that stays inside those words, plus a handful of new ones introduced gently and repeated a few pages later. Every word shows its meaning on tap, with pinyin. The whole story is read aloud, so your ear can catch up with your eyes.
It started with Chinese because that's what I'm learning. It works the same way in forty languages, from Spanish to Navajo, because the idea is the same everywhere: read what you can almost read, and the rest follows.
Who's behind it
ReadBilingual is made by Bobo Labs, a small studio. I'm Julia Tokola, and this is the app I wanted for myself.
If any of this sounds familiar, have a look at the library, or write to me at hello@readbilingual.com. I read every email.
Julia