Read the language you grew up hearing.
19 language packs · read the coverage section before you start
You are not a beginner. You just cannot read it yet.
Start above beginner, because you are
A course starts at hello. You can already argue with your aunt. Lector colours every word by what you know. A first import shows you the truth. You know more words than any placement test gives you.
The script is the wall, not the language
Tap any word to read it. The on-device dictionary answers most taps with no network and no key. Mandarin adds pinyin above every word, and each reading disappears as you learn that word.
Read what your family reads
Import a book, paste a message, or load a news article by URL. Nothing forces you through a graded reader about a family that is not yours.
Ask the questions you cannot ask at home
The tutor answers grammar questions in plain English. Ask why a form changes, or why your grandmother says it another way, without an explanation you must translate first.
Hear it, then check yourself
Lector can speak a word or a sentence, so you can match the text against the voice you remember. This feature uses Google Cloud and needs a connection.
Keep the vocabulary for life
Send every word you mine to your own Anki collection, both ways. Your vocabulary is yours, and it outlives any app.
The writing systems that stopped you.
Mandarin
The reader splits each sentence into words before you tap one. Pinyin sits above every word, and each reading retires when you mark that word known. Simplified and Traditional answer the same entry.
Pack detailArabic
Modern Standard Arabic, keyed the way a newspaper prints it, without the vowel marks. The definition still shows the vocalized spelling. A tap on وبالقلم reaches the entry for قلم.
Pack detailSpanish
The largest pack, and the shortest road from spoken fluency to reading fluency. Frequency-ordered practice starts where your ear already is.
Pack detailUkrainian
Cyrillic, with a full dictionary and a frequency-banded sentence bank. Russian and Polish packs sit beside it for a mixed family.
Pack detailSee every pack for the rest, including Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Swedish, French, and Indonesian.
Three things to check before you start.
A pack is a written standard
The Arabic pack is Modern Standard Arabic, the form newspapers and Wikipedia use. It is not Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, or Moroccan Arabic. The Chinese pack is Mandarin, not Cantonese and not Hokkien. If your family speaks a dialect, the pack teaches you to read, not to write the way your family talks.
Some big diaspora languages have no pack
There is no pack for Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Farsi, Somali, or Amharic. None of them is on the roadmap yet. Hindi, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Modern Greek, and Modern Hebrew are on the roadmap and not ready.
Japanese and Korean are half-built
Both ship the reader and the on-device dictionary today. Japanese puts furigana above kanji, and Korean peels postpositions off an eojeol. Neither has a cloze bank yet, so you can read and mine vocabulary, and you cannot practise it inside Lector.
Which language did you grow up with?
Name it, even when it is not on the list. We will email you once, on the day the pack is ready. No newsletter.
Your build order comes from this list. Want to talk it over? Join the Discord.
One copy, one library each.
- Give each person in the house a separate library and separate progress.
- Host it yourself, and family letters or family history never leave your hardware.
- Read the same book at different levels, because word states are per person.
- Export any library at any time. You always own the data.
The questions that matter most.
I speak it but I cannot read it. Is Lector for me?
Yes. This is the case Lector fits best. You bring vocabulary and an ear, and you need the writing system and the words you never met in speech. The reader marks what you know, and practice starts from the most common words instead of from the alphabet.
I never studied it formally. Where do I start?
Import something short that you want to read. Tap every word you do not know, and mark the ones you do. After one chapter your vocabulary record is real, and frequency-ordered cloze practice has something honest to work from.
My family speaks a dialect. Does the pack match it?
Often it does not, and this matters. The Arabic pack is Modern Standard Arabic, not a spoken dialect. The Chinese pack is Mandarin, not Cantonese. A pack teaches you the written standard, which is the form books, news, and official letters use. Your home dialect stays your home dialect.
Which languages have a pack today?
19 languages have a full pack: Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, German, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Swedish, Esperanto, Koine Greek, Latin. Japanese and Korean ship a dictionary and a reader with no cloze bank. Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Farsi, Somali, and Amharic have no pack and are not on the roadmap. Ask for yours with the form on this page.
Can my children use it too?
Yes. Multi-user accounts give each person their own library, their own vocabulary, and their own progress. Lector has no parental controls and no content filter, so you choose what goes into each library.
Is our family material private?
If you host Lector yourself, every book, letter, and note stays in a folder on your hardware. There is no telemetry and no analytics. See the privacy page for what Lector Cloud stores instead.
What does it cost?
If you host it yourself, nothing. Lector is open source with no feature gates. Lector Cloud starts at $5 a month if you prefer not to run a server.
It is already yours.
Import one chapter and mark what you know. Most heritage speakers are surprised by the answer.
Self-hosting is free forever, and your family material stays on your hardware.