The most efficient path to fluency: master high-frequency words one real sentence at a time.

Welcome to WordBrewery, a new language-learning app and website that helps you achieve fluency one sentence at a time. WordBrewery pulls real, recent, and relevant sentences from news sites around the world, tests these sentences to make sure they are useful to language learners, then uses these sentences to teach you the high-frequency vocabulary words you need to master in your target language. Each sentence you study on WordBrewery will bring you incrementally closer to mastery of the vocabulary and grammar you need for reading fluency. It will also give you real experience reading your target language from day one.

— You can choose what topics you want to read about—news, sports, business, technology, or travel, for example—and we will show you sentences from news articles in those topic areas. This makes it easy to focus on your area of interest and can give you a head start in understanding an article. By the time you start interacting with native speakers, you’ll be able to base your conversations on information you’ve learned by reading the same news sources as they have.

What makes WordBrewery different from other language sites?

Because people learn best with context and short bursts of activity, our unit of study is the sentence—not the artificial conversation or the isolated vocabulary word. WordBrewery users are never asked to study words out of context: if we show you a word, we will show you an example sentence along with it whenever possible. All of our sentences are scraped from news sources that are written by native speakers for native-speaker audiences. The sentence database refreshes constantly and discards each sentence after a period of time unless it believes the sentence is particularly valuable or unless a user saves the sentence to a study list—so every day, our sentence database gets bigger and better automatically. And you can make our content better for yourself and other users by saving sentences that you find helpful to study lists so they will never be deleted.

WordBrewery’s commitment to using real sentences makes our method in some ways more challenging than other sites, because real sentences are unpredictable. But we flatten the learning curve by allowing you to filter sentences by difficulty, look up any word by clicking the word (or moving your cursor over it), and retrieve a translation of full sentences with two clicks. And our algorithm only scrapes sentences likely to be useful and readable to language learners at different levels.

We track your level of understanding and gradually learn which words you know well and which you need to practice. In our Quiz Mode and language courses, we will use this data to show you sentences that we have chosen specifically for you: sentences that we think you can read, but that will be a just slightly above your skill level to help you make progress.

What do you want in a language-learning app?

We built WordBrewery because we wanted a way to learn, practice, and review languages and master core vocabulary in the most efficient way possible while using only real content. And we wanted a system that would allow us to make progress in short bursts at any stage of our learning, so we never feel like we have to start over again as beginners.

But what do you want? We want WordBrewery to be useful for you, so please let us know what you like, what you think could be better, and what would make you come back for more. Consider taking a short beta tester survey to let us know. If you want to help us build a mobile app or hire more native-speaker voice actors to record sentences, please consider making a small donation; everything helps!

Click here to receive new WordBrewery Blog posts by email or RSS, and click here to join our email community. And if you haven’t tried reading the news in another language on WordBrewery yet, please give it a try. Your support helps us grow and build more useful features and content for language learners around the world.