Import a text
Texts turn any reading material into something you can study word by word - an article, song lyrics, a chapter you typed up, subtitles you copied.
Creating one
- Open My Library and choose Create.
- Under Import Content, choose Text.
- Fill in the Import Text form:
- Title - up to 200 characters.
- Text Content - up to 50,000 characters. Markdown works, so bold, italics, headings and lists are all fine.
- Target Language and Source Language.
- Choose Create Text.
Imported texts are always private and only visible to you. There's no option to publish one, which means you can paste in copyrighted material for your own study without it being shared.
The free plan allows 100 texts; Premium removes that limit.
Reading and editing
Open a text from your library and switch between Read and Edit.
In Read mode you can tap or select any word to translate it, save it to a deck, or mark it as known - see The translation popover. The header shows the word count and the language.
Edit lets you fix or extend the content. Note that editing the body clears any generated audio, so do your editing before generating audio rather than after.
Audio (Premium)
Generate Audio creates spoken audio sentence by sentence using Google Text-to-Speech. This is a Premium feature, though once a text has audio, playing it during study needs nothing special.
Studying it
Study opens sentence-by-sentence study mode, which is the main reason to import a text rather than just read it in a browser tab.
Choosing good material
Texts work best slightly above your comfortable level - enough unknown words to learn from, not so many that every sentence needs translating. If you're translating more than a handful of words per sentence, the text is too hard to enjoy, and a shorter or simpler one will teach you more.