Léelo Is Live
Every Tuesday I ship something. This week it is Léelo, an app for iPhone and iPad that teaches Spanish the way you actually learned to read: by reading, one real sentence at a time, with help right where you need it.
How it works
Léelo is built around a library of 296 leveled readers spanning the full CEFR ladder, A1 through C2, plus real public-domain classics from writers like Unamuno, José Martí, and Victor Hugo. The A1 stories use only the present tense, and the ladder climbs from there through the subjunctive, the conditional, and eventually near-native literary Spanish. You start wherever you can already read and move up when it feels easy.
Tap any word: One tap gives you a definition, the part of speech, and audio pronunciation, drawn from an on-device dictionary or Apple Intelligence, your choice. No leaving the page, no dictionary app, no losing your place.
Tap any sentence: Get a natural translation plus a word-by-word breakdown, so you can see both what the sentence means and how it is put together. This runs on Apple’s Translation framework.
Save words and review them: Words you tap can be saved and sorted as New, Learning, Familiar, or Known. Léelo turns them into review cards and keeps a daily streak, so the vocabulary from your reading actually sticks instead of scrolling past.
Bring your own books: Import any Spanish EPUB from Files or iCloud Drive and read it with the exact same tap-to-translate tools as the built-in library.
Sync across your devices: Saved words, reading streaks, and progress move automatically between your iPhone and iPad through iCloud.
Why I built it
Flashcards taught me isolated words that fell apart the moment I saw them in a real sentence. What actually moved me forward was reading, but reading Spanish meant a book in one hand and a dictionary app in the other, and the friction of looking things up killed the flow every few words. Léelo puts the dictionary inside the page. Tap, understand, keep reading. You build vocabulary from real context, the way it sticks, instead of drilling words that never quite connect to anything.
The readers are leveled carefully so you are never drowning and never bored, and once you outgrow the built-in library you can bring in whatever Spanish book you want to read next.
Pricing
Léelo is free to start, and the free tier stays free forever: every A1 reader, five hand-picked classics, and two books you import yourself. Premium unlocks the full library across all six CEFR levels for $5.99 a month with a 30-day free trial, or $49.99 once for lifetime access. No ads and no tracking on either tier.
Léelo is on the App Store. See leeloreader.com or the Léelo app page for more.
What’s next
More next Tuesday.