Mitlesen
Hello — and thanks for stopping by.
This is the first real post on the Mitlesen blog, so I want to start at the beginning: why this app exists at all. The short version is that I am a German learner myself, and Mitlesen is the tool I spent two years wishing somebody else would build. The long version is below.
The gap nobody fills
Most language apps are great at the bottom of the ladder — A1 vocabulary drills, basic dialogues, "Mein Name ist...". They are also great at the top: once you can read newspapers comfortably, the whole German-speaking internet opens up.
The middle is where almost everyone gets stuck.
Past A2, the textbook exercises start to feel patronising — but the real-world stuff isn't ready for you yet. Die Zeit articles, Cornelia Funke novels, Krimi paperbacks: every paragraph has four words you don't know and a Konjunktiv II you've never seen. You stop, look something up, lose the thread, and three pages later you have learned nothing and remembered nothing.
The honest truth is that to get good at reading German, you have to read a lot of German. The other honest truth is that almost nobody manages to, because the friction is too high.
What I tried first
Before I started writing code, I tried everything I could find:
- Bilingual editions. Fine — until you realise you've stopped reading the German side at all.
- Hover-translate browser extensions. Useful on the web, but useless in a paper book, and they don't teach you grammar.
- Audiobooks. Wonderful, until a sentence flies past and you have no way to slow it down or look up the word that just went by.
- Graded readers from major publishers. Better. But the stories are written for classrooms, not for someone curled up on a couch wanting to enjoy a story in their target language.
None of them gave me what I actually wanted. Which was, to put it plainly:
I wanted to read a German story. Not an exercise. A real story — with characters, a plot, an ending that means something — the way I read in my native language, in flow, without stopping every twenty seconds.
What I actually needed
It took me a while to articulate this, but eventually I realised I needed three things at once, and no single tool gave me all three.
Stories at my level. Not children's books, not textbook exercises. Real stories — fairy tales, short fiction, novellas — rewritten carefully so that the vocabulary and grammar match where I am, not where the author was writing for.
Instant lookup, in context. When I hit a word I didn't know, I wanted to tap it and see the meaning right there, in the same screen, before I lost my place. No app switching, no scribbling on a notebook, no pulling out a dictionary.
Grammar I could see. Some German sentences are just hard. Long verbs at the end. Surprising cases. Konjunktiv II. When that happened, I wanted to tap the sentence and see the structure laid out — verb, subject, the cases that explain why dem instead of der.
That's the trio. Story + dictionary + grammar, on one screen, on my phone, in bed.
What Mitlesen is
Mitlesen is exactly that, and nothing more.
- Graded stories at A1, A2, B1, and B2. The same story, four difficulties — pick the level that feels like a gentle stretch, not a wall.
- Tap to translate. Any word, instantly. The dictionary slides up from the bottom of the screen, you read the definition and an example, you tap away, the flow returns.
- Smart grammar. When a sentence is hard, tap it to see the parts highlighted — verb, subject, the cases — colour-coded.
- Native audio. Every story is read aloud by a native speaker. Read along to learn the rhythm, or close your eyes and just listen.
- Flashcards that remember context. Save a word from a story and it keeps the sentence with it forever. When the card comes up for review, you see the exact passage where you first met it.
That's it. No streaks, no gems, no virtual mascot guilting you into another session. Just stories — in the language you're learning — with everything you need to actually finish them.
Who is behind this
Mitlesen is built by a tiny studio — me and a partner who reviews every story before it ships, alongside a small team of native German narrators. We are not a venture-backed startup. We are two people who care about this problem and are willing to spend years getting it right.
The library is still growing — fairy tales, novellas, contemporary short fiction — one careful adaptation pass at a time. Each story is rewritten across four CEFR levels, narrated by a native speaker, and proofread before it goes into the app.
What's next
I'll use this blog to share what we're working on: new stories in the library, features I'm building, things I learn about reading German that I wish someone had told me three years ago.
If there's a German story you've always wanted to read, or a feature you wish the app had, tell me. Most of what's in Mitlesen today is there because somebody asked.
If you've ever closed a German book in frustration — this app is for you. Give it a try, and let me know what's broken.
Danke fürs Mitlesen.
— Hani