Feature
Read News and Wikipedia Articles in Many Languages
Short, real texts about what is happening in the world, in the language you are learning.
Not every day has room for a novel. The Articles section gives you short reads on topics you pick: recent stories from Global Voices, or explainers from Wikipedia. Open one and it works like any other book, with translation, word lookup, audio and flashcards.
Free, no sign-up.
How it works
- Open News and Wiki from the home page.
- Choose a source, a language and a topic.
- Pick an article from the list. It is saved to your library as a short text.
- Read it with paragraph translation, word lookup and narrator audio, and save new words as flashcards.
News from around the world
The News source shows the newest stories of a topic from Global Voices, in the editions that are published in your language: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Ukrainian, Greek, Catalan and Esperanto. Topics include politics, human rights, world affairs, economy, technology, health, environment, science, and arts and culture.
News is written for native readers, so it is harder than the encyclopedia. Use Simplified mode to bring a difficult story down to B1.
Wikipedia explainers
The Encyclopedia source gives clear explanations of a topic from Wikipedia: science, cosmos, medicine, politics, nature, technology, history, economy and culture. The same topic is looked up in the language you choose, which makes it a good way to compare how a subject is explained in two languages.
Saved like a book
An article you open is saved in your library as a short text with its source credited at the end, so you can come back to it and keep your place. Because it is a normal text, every reading feature works: paragraph translation, contextual word lookup, narrator audio, flashcards and word games.
Free sources, credited
News comes from Global Voices under a CC BY licence and encyclopedia texts from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. Articles are shortened excerpts and each one links back to the original.
Questions
- Are the news stories up to date?
- The list shows the newest stories of the topic in each language edition when you open it. Editions differ in how often they publish, so some topics have fewer recent stories.
- Can I read the full article?
- PolyglotReader saves a shortened excerpt for reading practice and links to the original article at the end, where you can read the whole text.
- Why is my language missing from the news list?
- News is available in the Global Voices editions that are still published. The encyclopedia covers more languages, so try that source for yours.
More answers on the FAQ page.