Readuet blog

How to read along with an audiobook you own: sync your EPUB with MP3 or M4B files

2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

You have a book twice: as an ebook and as an audiobook, a folder of MP3s or one M4B. You'd like to see the text light up as the narrator reads it, the way Kindle and Audible do for the books they sell. Here is how to do that with your own files, and how long it takes.

We make Readuet, the app this guide ends with, so read it with that in mind.

The short answer

You need two files of the same book, the ebook and the audiobook, and an app that aligns them: it works out when each sentence is spoken, so the right one can light up.

Bought both from Amazon? Kindle and Audible already do it for you, in their own apps.
Have your own files and a home server? Storyteller aligns them on your own hardware.
Have your own files and want to start now? Upload both to Readuet. About 30 seconds later the opening is ready and you're reading along. The rest of the book lines up while you read.

What you need

An ebook: EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 or TXT.

The audiobook of the same book: MP3, M4B, M4A, AAC, OGG, OPUS, FLAC or WAV. One file or many: an audiobook in 40 MP3s is fine, they play in filename order.

The same edition. This is the one thing worth checking before you start. Small differences don't matter: front matter, a publisher's blurb, a narrator's introduction, a spoken "Chapter One" the page doesn't have. But the highlight drifts and never catches up when the audiobook is:

abridged and the ebook is the full text;
a different translation of the same work;
a dramatisation with several actors, music and cut lines.

More in our guide to reading along with the narration.

Kindle and Audible: only for books bought from Amazon

Audible's help says that for Read & Listen (formerly Whispersync for Voice) "you'll need both the audiobook and Kindle eBook in your Audible and Kindle libraries". Immersion Reading is the highlighted version: "the text highlights as the narrator reads".

It is polished and needs no setup. But it pairs only a Kindle ebook with its Audible audiobook, so the files you already have stay on your disk. And it is a reading feature rather than a language tool: a dictionary lookup, but no translation in context and no review of the words you met.

Storyteller: your own files, on your own server

Storyteller describes itself as "a self-hosted platform for automatically aligning ebooks and audiobooks". It's open source, and "all of your books stay on your hardware". You add an EPUB and its audiobook, it aligns them, and you read the result in Storyteller's iOS and Android apps, offline if you like.

What it asks of you is a computer to run it on. Its own requirements are Docker, 8 GB of memory, up to 4 CPU cores and about 1 GB of disk per book. A GPU is optional. The docs say the hardest part of the work is transcription, and that a GPU "can sometimes be a speedup of 10x or greater". They give no processing times, because those depend on your machine. Like Kindle, it's built for reading and listening: we found nothing in its docs about translating words or reviewing vocabulary.

If you already run a home server and want your library to stay on it, Storyteller is a good fit. If you'd rather not install anything, or you're learning a language, read on.

Readuet: your own files, reading along in about 30 seconds

It's fast

You upload the ebook and the audiobook. Readuet transcribes the narration and matches it to the text, so every sentence gets a start and an end time.

That work happens on our servers, not on your phone or a computer you have to set up. There's nothing to install, your battery doesn't pay for it, and a long book doesn't mean a long wait. About 30 seconds after the upload, the opening is ready and the narrator is reading along with you. The rest of the book lines up behind you while you read. If you jump far ahead, the part you land on is timed within moments.

It's your own books

Anything you own as an ebook and an audiobook: a novel in the language you're learning, a book you've read before in translation, the audiobook you never finished. It stays in your library, with your place kept across the browser and the iPhone app.

It's built for learning a language

This is the difference from every reading app:

The sentence being read is the one that's lit. Press and hold any sentence and choose Play from here to send the narrator there.
Tap any word you don't know and you get its translation in that sentence, not a dictionary list, in any of 67 languages you translate into.
Every word you tap is saved with its CEFR level (A1–C2), and in ten major European languages all its forms count as one word.
Saved words come back for review as spaced-repetition flashcards, and meeting a word again in the book counts too. You stop looking up the same word three chapters in a row.

Why reading and listening together works: what the research says. How to turn it into a routine: how to learn a language with audiobooks.

What it costs

The free plan includes a library of public-domain classics, with narration and read-along on the ones already prepared, plus tap-to-translate, review, and a few of your own ebooks as text.
Solo ($4.99 a month or $29.99 a year) adds the audiobooks you own and lines them up with the text when you ask.
Duet ($7.99 a month or $49.99 a year) gives your own books the live highlight from about 30 seconds after the upload.

Both paid plans start with a free week. Readuet runs in the browser at app.readuet.com and on iPhone and iPad. The Android app is in testing and not out yet.

Step by step

Sign in at app.readuet.com or in the iPhone app. Uploading needs an account, not a guest session.
In your library, tap Add book, then Choose ebook and pick your EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 or TXT.
Tap Add audiobook now, then Choose audiobook file(s), and select every file of the book at once.
Tap Upload and process. You can leave the screen: you'll get a notification when the book is ready.
Open the book and press play. The sentence being read lights up. Tap a word you don't know.

You can also add the audiobook later to an ebook that's already in your library.

Want to try it before uploading anything? Books badged Instant in our free library are already paired and open with their narration on every plan, and this list sorts free books by CEFR level.

Kindle and Audible vs Storyteller vs Readuet

	Kindle and Audible	Storyteller	Readuet
Which books	A Kindle ebook plus its Audible audiobook	Your own EPUB and audiobook files	Your own ebook and audiobook files, plus a free library
Setup	None	Your own server with Docker, 8 GB of memory	None: sign in and upload
How fast	Ready when you buy both	Depends on your hardware; a GPU helps a lot	Reading along about 30 seconds after the upload
Where your books live	Amazon	Your own hardware	Our cloud, synced across your devices
Unknown words	Dictionary lookup	Not covered in its docs	One tap: translation in context, saved, reviewed later
Built for	Reading and listening	Reading and listening	Learning a language
Where you read	Audible and Kindle apps, Fire tablets	Storyteller's iOS and Android apps	Browser, iPhone and iPad
Cost	You buy both halves	Free software; you run the server	Free library; your own audiobooks from $4.99 a month

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take before I can read along?

About 30 seconds after the upload finishes, with Duet. Readuet aligns the opening first so you can start, and lines up the rest of the book while you read. The alignment runs on our servers, so your phone does no heavy lifting.

How is Readuet different from Storyteller?

Both line up your own ebook with your own audiobook. Storyteller runs on a server you set up, keeps everything on your hardware, and takes as long as your machine needs. Readuet runs in our cloud with nothing to install, has you reading along about 30 seconds after the upload, and is built for learning a language: tap a word for its translation in context, and it comes back for review.

Does the ebook have to be the same edition as the audiobook?

Yes. Small differences like a preface or a narrator's introduction are absorbed. An abridged recording, a different translation or a dramatisation won't line up, however long the processing runs.

My audiobook is 40 MP3 files. Is that a problem?

No. Select them all at once when you add the audiobook; they play in filename order, so files numbered 01, 02, 03 come out in the right order. A single M4B works too.

Which languages can I read in?

Dozens, for the book and for the language you translate into: there are 67 to translate into. Grouping every form of a word under one dictionary form covers ten major European languages. Chinese, Japanese and Korean aren't supported yet, and neither is PDF.

Can I do this for free?

You can read along for free with the prepared books in our public-domain library. Pairing your own audiobook needs Solo or Duet, and both start with a free week.

Does reading while listening actually help you learn a language?

Studies of reading while listening found gains in vocabulary, comprehension and reading fluency, with some limits. We went through them in what the research says.

Practise your vocabulary with Claude: quiz yourself on the words from your books

2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

You've been reading a book in the language you're learning and saving words as you go. Readuet brings them back in spaced-repetition review, a card at a time: you see the word, try to remember it, and say how it went. That works, but a card can't ask you a follow-up question, notice that you keep mixing up two words, or explain why you got one wrong.

An AI assistant can. Now you can connect Claude to your Readuet account, and it will quiz you on the words you actually saved, in the sentences you met them in, and save your answers to the same review schedule the app uses. This post explains what it can and can't do, how to connect it, and what to ask.

Why practise with a conversation at all

The reason flashcards work isn't the cards. It's the effort of pulling a word out of memory. In a well-known experiment, students learning Swahili words remembered far more of them a week later when they kept being tested on them than when they kept studying them, even though they felt about equally confident either way (Karpicke and Roediger, 2008). Testing yourself is the learning, not just a check on it.

A conversation keeps that effort and adds what a card can't:

It quizzes in context. Claude sees the sentence from the book where you saved each word, so it can ask "what does particulars mean here?" instead of showing the word alone.
It can go the other way. It can give you the meaning and ask for the word, or ask you to use it in a sentence of your own, which is harder and sticks better than recognising it.
It explains. When you get one wrong, you can ask why, compare it with a word you confuse it with, or ask for two more examples.
It speaks your language. You can talk to it in your native language while it quizzes you in the one you're learning.

What Claude can see and do

Once you connect it, Claude can:

see the words you saved, with their translations, CEFR levels and whether they are due for review
see the sentences you met them in, and the titles of those books
record how you did on a word, as a rating from again to easy, exactly as a review in the app would

It can't add or delete words, change your books, or see your email address or payment details. Nothing is shared until you approve it on a Readuet page, and you can disconnect it at any time.

Two rules keep your schedule honest. Claude is told to record a result only for a word you actually answered in that conversation, never for one it just showed or explained. And Readuet accepts a result only for a word that is due, once, so an assistant can't push a word's next review months away by marking it easy ten times.

How to connect Claude

Open Readuet in Claude's directory and choose Connect. You can also find it in Claude under Settings → Connectors.
A Readuet page opens. Sign in, check that it names Claude, and choose Connect.

That's it. If the directory page doesn't open for you, choose Add custom connector in Settings → Connectors instead and enter https://api.readuet.com/mcp. You need a Readuet account; if you've been reading as a guest, the page offers to create one first, and your saved words come with you. The full steps, and what to do if something goes wrong, are in the help page.

ChatGPT is next. Readuet is in review for ChatGPT's plugin directory and will appear there soon. Other assistants that support remote MCP servers with sign-in can already connect with the same address.

What to ask

Start a new chat and ask in plain words. Some that work well:

"Quiz me on the words I have due today."
"Give me the meaning and I'll give you the word. Ten words, B1 only."
"Which of my saved words are at B2 level? Make a short story with five of them."
"Have I saved particulars? Where did I see it?"
"Explain the difference between the words I got wrong today."

Claude asks one word at a time and waits for your answer. A session of ten or fifteen words takes a few minutes, which is about the right size to do every day.

An example

Here's roughly how a session goes. Say you saved particulars in the first sentence of Treasure Island:

You: Quiz me on today's words.

Claude: You have 12 words due. First one, from Treasure Island: "…asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island." What does particulars mean here?

You: the details?

Claude: Yes, the details, the full story. I've marked that as good. Next…

The exact wording will differ from session to session, since Claude writes its own questions. The translations it sees come from Readuet; the explanations are its own, so treat a grammar point that sounds odd the way you would any explanation from an AI.

Where Readuet fits

Readuet is a reader for learning languages with books and audiobooks together: the sentence being narrated is highlighted as you listen, you tap a word to see what it means in that sentence, and the words you save come back in review. Connecting an assistant is free on every plan. There's a free catalog of about 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages, graded from A2 to C2, so if you haven't saved any words yet, pick a book at your level and come back with a few dozen.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a paid Claude plan?

No. On Claude's Free plan you can add Readuet as a custom connector, and Free allows one. Claude's usual message limits for your plan still apply, because the quiz runs on your own Claude account.

Does it cost anything on the Readuet side?

No. Any Readuet account can connect an assistant, on the free plan too. Only guest reading needs an account first.

Which languages does it work with?

Any language you're learning in Readuet. Claude sees each language you've saved words in and quizzes you on one at a time. You can talk to it in whichever language you like.

Will it mess up my review schedule?

It shouldn't. A result counts only for a word that is due, and only once, the same as a review in the app. Results from an assistant are also marked as such, so they can be told apart from reviews you did in the app.

Can Claude add words to my vocabulary?

Not yet. For now it reads your words and records reviews. You save words by tapping them while you read.

How do I disconnect it?

Open Settings → AI assistants in Readuet and choose Disconnect next to Claude. Access stops straight away. Resetting your password disconnects every assistant too.

When will ChatGPT work?

Readuet is in review for ChatGPT's plugin directory. We'll update this post and the help page as soon as it is listed.

How to learn a language with books and audiobooks: what to read at each level

2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Most language courses stop just when you want to start using the language. You can order a coffee and fill in a form, but a real book is still out of reach, and there's a long, boring stretch between the two.

Reading while listening is a good way across it. The narrator shows you how the words sound and keeps you moving, and the page shows you the words that speech runs together. Below is how to do that in Readuet, followed by the books we'd pick at each level in eight languages, from A2 to C2. All of them are public domain and free, with the full text and a recording of that same text.

If you're learning English, we keep a longer list: free English audiobooks with matching text by CEFR level.

How to study with a book in Readuet

Open the catalog in your language. Go to Discover, choose Books, then tap the language you're learning. Filter by level, or open a book straight from the tables below. You can start in the browser at app.readuet.com with no account, and Readuet asks for a free one after a few minutes of reading.
Choose a book one step easier than you think you need. On the first page, count the unknown words in about a hundred words of text. Up to five or so is about right. At ten or more, go down a level.
Read and listen at the same time. The sentence being read lights up, so when your attention slips you can see where you were. Press and hold any sentence to have the narrator play from there. If the narrator is too fast, slow the audio down rather than stopping every few seconds.
Tap only the words that stop you. You get a translation that fits this sentence, in your own language. Save the ones that keep coming back, and let the rest go.
Review a little every day. Saved words come back in spaced-repetition review, in the Words tab. Meeting a word again in your book counts as a review too, so reading is part of the practice.
Listen again without the text. A chapter you've already read is one you can follow on the bus. Audio on its own teaches very few new words, but it's excellent for the words you've already seen. We explain why in how to learn a language with audiobooks.

Twenty minutes a day is plenty. It helps more to finish the chapter than to study for a long time.

How to read the levels

The levels are our own estimates of how hard the language in a book is, on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2. They don't say how deep the book is, or who it's for.

Level	Roughly means	What to expect
A2	Beginner with some basics	Short, simple stories, usually for children
B1	Lower intermediate	Plain stories and familiar plots. You'll still need the dictionary
B2	Upper intermediate	Real novels and stories for adults
C1	Advanced	Dense prose and long sentences
C2	Near-native	Poetry, verse drama and old language

There are no A1 books in the catalog. Complete books are too hard at that stage, even ones written for children, so start with a course and come back around A2.

Most of these books are more than a hundred years old, so two things to expect. Spelling can look dated, especially in Dutch and Portuguese. And the words are sometimes old-fashioned, so a level can feel harder than it says. If a book feels too hard, try one from the level below. Nobody will know.

German

Heidi and Maya the Bee are good first books if you know the stories from childhood. Both are group recordings with several narrators.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
A2	Kasperle auf Reisen	Josephine Siebe	5.0 h	A living puppet keeps running off into the wide world. A funny children's book with one narrator throughout.
B1	Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer	Waldemar Bonsels	4.9 h	A young bee leaves the hive. A simple story with lots of dialogue.
B1	Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre	Johanna Spyri	6.0 h	The original Heidi. If you know the story, you can follow it from context.
B2	Brennendes Geheimnis	Stefan Zweig	2.6 h	A short, tense novella in clear, elegant German.
B2	Unterm Birnbaum	Theodor Fontane	3.9 h	A village crime story. Short, and you'll want to know how it ends.
C1	Effi Briest	Theodor Fontane	13.9 h	The great German marriage novel, and much of it is conversation.
C2	Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß	Robert Musil	6.4 h	A boarding-school novel where the difficulty is in the ideas and the long sentences.

Spanish

There's nothing at A2 with audio yet. If you know Treasure Island, it's the gentlest way in, even at 11 hours.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
B1	La isla del tesoro	Robert Louis Stevenson	11.2 h	A Spanish translation of the pirate story you already know.
B1	El clavo	Pedro Antonio de Alarcón	1.5 h	A short crime story you can finish in a couple of evenings. A group recording.
B2	Marianela	Benito Pérez Galdós	6.0 h	A moving story with a clear plot, and a good first Galdós.
B2	Abel Sánchez	Miguel de Unamuno	3.8 h	A novel about envy in short chapters and simple, direct language.
C1	Pepita Jiménez	Juan Valera	6.6 h	A novel told largely in letters, in rich 19th-century Spanish.
C2	Don Quijote	Miguel de Cervantes	44.5 h	The long one. Early modern Spanish, read by one narrator from start to finish.

French

If you're not sure where to start, try Arsène Lupin: nine short, self-contained stories with one narrator.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
A2	Nouveaux contes de fées pour les petits enfants	Comtesse de Ségur	5.5 h	Fairy tales written for small children.
B1	Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur	Maurice Leblanc	6.7 h	Short crime stories that are easy to keep reading.
B1	Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours	Jules Verne	8.1 h	A race around the world with a clear plot. A group recording.
B2	Contes de la Bécasse	Guy de Maupassant	4.2 h	Short stories from the master of the form. One story per sitting.
B2	La Mare au Diable	George Sand	3.5 h	A short country love story in calm, clear prose.
C1	Zadig	Voltaire	3.0 h	A quick, witty philosophical tale. A group recording.
C2	La princesse de Clèves	Madame de La Fayette	5.5 h	A 17th-century novel of the French court, in formal, precise language.

Italian

There's nothing at A2 with audio yet. Pinocchio is the classic first book: generations of Italian children grew up on it.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
B1	Le avventure di Pinocchio	Carlo Collodi	4.8 h	The original Pinocchio: short chapters and plenty of action.
B1	Il fantasma di Canterville e il delitto di Lord Savile	Oscar Wilde	2.6 h	Two of Wilde's funny stories in translation, short and easy to follow. A group recording.
B2	Il fu Mattia Pascal	Luigi Pirandello	8.9 h	A man reported dead takes the chance to start a new life. A great premise.
B2	Canne al vento	Grazia Deledda	9.0 h	A novel of rural Sardinia by a winner of the Nobel Prize.
C1	I Malavoglia	Giovanni Verga	8.2 h	A Sicilian fishing family. The language is full of proverbs and local turns of phrase.
C2	La Divina Commedia	Dante Alighieri	10.9 h	Hearing the verse makes it far easier to follow. A group recording.

Polish

Polish is the language to choose if you care most about the audio. These recordings come from Wolne Lektury and are read by professional narrators. Many are very short, so you can finish a whole story in one sitting.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
A2	Kopciuszek	Brothers Grimm	0.2 h	Cinderella in about ten minutes. You already know what happens.
B1	Legendy polskie	Cecylia Niewiadomska	0.5 h	Short Polish legends, and a little culture as well as language.
B1	Duch z Canterville	Oscar Wilde	1.2 h	Wilde's funny ghost story in translation.
B1	Tajemniczy ogród	Frances Hodgson Burnett	8.2 h	The Secret Garden. A first long book at a gentle pace.
B2	Latarnik	Henryk Sienkiewicz	0.7 h	An old Polish exile finds his language again in a book. A classic short story.
B2	Kamizelka	Bolesław Prus	0.4 h	A short, sad love story told through a waistcoat.
C1	Syzyfowe prace	Stefan Żeromski	7.8 h	A novel about Polish schoolboys in the Russian Empire.
C2	Zemsta	Aleksander Fredro	1.9 h	A comedy in verse, and it's funnier when you hear it.
C2	Pan Tadeusz	Adam Mickiewicz	8.7 h	The Polish national epic. Long, in verse, and worth it.

Dutch

Much of the Dutch catalog uses old spelling (zoo, mensch), so expect a word to look slightly different from what you learned. Once you get used to it, the sound helps.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
A2	Kabouters in het Bosch	Kees Valkenstein	1.3 h	Gnomes and other forest creatures, in five short chapters.
B1	Uit het leven van Dik Trom	C. Joh. Kieviet	3.4 h	The mischief of a Dutch children's classic.
B1	Kinderen uit m'n klas	P. J. Cohen de Vries	4.4 h	Portraits of children in a 1920s primary school, first published in a newspaper.
B2	De reis om de wereld in tachtig dagen	Jules Verne	7.3 h	Around the World in Eighty Days in Dutch. A plot you can follow.
B2	De kleine Johannes	Frederik van Eeden	4.1 h	A fairy tale that slowly becomes a grown-up story.
C1	Max Havelaar	Multatuli	12.6 h	The best-known Dutch novel, an attack on colonial rule in the East Indies.

Portuguese

Machado de Assis and José de Alencar wrote in Brazil, Eça de Queirós in Portugal. Choose by the country whose Portuguese you want, though the spelling in all of them is older than today's.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
A2	Era uma vez...	Júlia Lopes de Almeida	0.8 h	A fairy tale with a castle and a princess, in under an hour.
B1	Cinco minutos	José de Alencar	1.8 h	A short romance with a simple plot.
B2	O Alienista	Machado de Assis	2.0 h	A doctor starts locking up a whole town. Funny, and sharp.
B2	O Mandarim	Eça de Queirós	2.4 h	A Lisbon clerk gets a devil's offer. A short fantasy in European Portuguese.
C1	Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas	Machado de Assis	7.8 h	A dead man tells his own life. Short chapters, full of irony.
C1	A Cidade e as Serras	Eça de Queirós	8.4 h	A rich man leaves Paris for the Portuguese mountains.
C2	Os Lusíadas	Luís de Camões	6.5 h	The Portuguese national epic, in 16th-century verse.

Russian

There's one book here with free read-along so far, and it's B2. The other Russian books in the catalog are free to read, and their narration comes with a paid plan.

Level	Book	Author	Length	Why this one
B2	Белые ночи	Fyodor Dostoevsky	2.0 h	A short, gentle Dostoevsky, about two people on the streets of St Petersburg.

Other languages

Ukrainian has text but no recordings yet, so there's no read-along. You can still read with tap-to-translate: Федько-халамидник (B1), Захар Беркут (B2), Лісова пісня (C1) or Тіні забутих предків (C2).
Other languages, Czech and Turkish among them, have no free books in the catalog. You can still add your own DRM-free ebook for free, and its audiobook on a paid plan. Tap-to-translate works, but word forms are matched exactly rather than grouped. Chinese, Japanese and Korean aren't supported yet.

What's free

Reading any book in the catalog is free, and so are the saved words and review. The books in the tables above come with narration and read-along on the free plan, and you'll see them marked ⚡ Instant in the catalog. On other catalog books, the narration comes with a paid plan. After your first week, the free plan includes 25 translations a day, and words you've already saved don't count.

Readuet works in the browser on a phone or a computer, and on iPhone and iPad. Android is coming soon.

The recordings are read by people, not machines. Outside Polish they're by LibriVox volunteers, so quality varies: listen to the first chapter before you settle in. Group recordings change voice from chapter to chapter, which is why we point them out.

Frequently asked questions

Are these books really free?

Yes. They're in the public domain: the texts come from Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and Wolne Lektury, and the recordings from LibriVox and Wolne Lektury. On the free plan you can read and listen to every book in the tables above.

What level do I need to start?

About A2. Below that, complete books are too hard, and a course will take you further. The levels above are estimates, so trust the first page: if you stop in every sentence, go down a level.

Can I learn a language from books alone?

Not on their own. Books give you a lot of reading and listening, and a large vocabulary, but you'll also need to speak and write. Use them alongside a course or lessons, not instead.

Which language will the translations be in?

The one you choose. Readuet translates words into dozens of languages, and it doesn't have to be the language of the app. So you can read German with the translations in your own language.

Can I read my own books?

Yes. You can add your own ebooks on the free plan. Adding the audiobook and reading along with it is what the paid plans are for.

Kindle Immersion Reading for language learners: what it does, what it costs, and the alternatives

2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Immersion Reading sounds made for language learners: the text lights up while a professional narrator reads it. It's a good feature, and for some learners it's enough. But Amazon built it for people reading in a language they already know, and that shows in three places: which languages it covers, what happens when you don't know a word, and what it costs per book.

We make Readuet, one of the alternatives below, so read this with that in mind. Everything about other products comes from their own pages or the sources linked, checked on 30 October 2026 unless we say otherwise.

What Immersion Reading does

Immersion Reading plays an audiobook while its ebook is on screen, and the text highlights as the narrator reads. It uses the audiobook's real narrator, not text-to-speech.

The names are confusing, so here they are:

Read & Listen is the current name for what used to be Whispersync for Voice. It keeps your place when you switch between the ebook and the audiobook.
Immersion Reading is the part where you do both at once, with the highlight.
Audible's in-app version arrived on 18 February 2026. Until then the highlight lived in Kindle's apps and on Fire tablets. Now you can also use it inside the Audible app, with the ebook text loaded from your Kindle library.

Where it works

Audible's help page lists these for immersion reading: the Audible apps on iOS and Android, including tablets, the Audible app for macOS, and Fire tablets on Fire OS 8 or later. In the Audible app it needs an internet connection, because the ebook text loads online, though some pages are saved for offline viewing.

Kindle e-readers are the catch. Audible says models from 2022 on support Read & Listen, which means keeping your place between formats, but they aren't on the immersion reading list. If you were hoping to follow a highlight on a Paperwhite, don't buy on that assumption.

What it means for learners

The languages are the first thing to check

This is where the official sources disagree. Audible's February announcement describes launch titles in English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. Its Read & Listen page says immersion reading is available for supported English and German titles in the US, UK, Australia and Germany. We couldn't find a list of eligible titles by language.

So if you're learning English or German, you have the best chance of finding your book. For anything else, check the actual title first, and look for the Read & Listen badge. Beyond those five languages, we found no sign of support at all.

The highlight helps, but it isn't the whole job

Hearing a word while you see it is useful, especially in a language where the spelling doesn't tell you the sound. But the research is more modest than the marketing around it. In the study everyone cites, Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008), reading while listening beat listening alone clearly, but the gap with reading alone wasn't statistically significant. Three months later, learners could recall about one new word per book unprompted. Words that came up more often stuck better.

What this means in practice is that the words you meet need to come back. Our summary of the research goes through the rest of the evidence.

Looking up a word is where it falls short

There's no language-learning layer on top of the highlight. In Kindle you get the usual lookup: a dictionary entry, Wikipedia and a machine translation of what you selected, and Vocabulary Builder flashcards on e-readers, with no review scheduling (our comparison has the details, checked on 22 October). Kindle's built-in tools also see the word or phrase you selected, not how it's used in that sentence.

In the Audible app, the help page lists font, text size, theme, playback speed and chapter navigation as the reading controls. It doesn't mention word lookup, so we wouldn't count on it.

Playback speed is the good news here: you can slow the narrator down, which matters more for a learner than for anyone else.

What it costs

There's no fee for the feature itself, but you pay for both halves of every book. You need both the audiobook and the Kindle ebook in your libraries, and as Publishing Perspectives put it, the reader must still purchase both.

The audiobook. Audible's US price page wouldn't open for us from Europe, so this figure comes from a third-party tracker: Premium Plus at $14.95 a month with one credit, checked by them on 26 September 2026. Check the current price in your own store.
The discount. If you own the ebook, Amazon offers discounted audiobooks for matching titles. The size of the discount varies by title.
Kindle Unlimited. It doesn't solve this. Audible says the audiobook isn't always included and availability varies by title.

This is fine for one book you really want. It adds up fast for a learner, who may need to try several books before finding one at the right level, and who may abandon the first few.

The alternatives

	Immersion Reading	Readuet	LingQ	Beelinguapp
Synced text and audio	Highlight follows the narrator	Whole audiobook to whole book, every sentence timed	Per lesson, after you upload audio	Karaoke-style scrolling text
Content	Paired Kindle and Audible titles	Over 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages, or your own audiobooks (paid)	Lesson library and imports	Its own stories
Tap a word	Dictionary or machine translation	Translation of the word in that sentence, saved	Pick from suggested meanings, saved	Glossary, with the translation alongside
Review	Vocabulary Builder on e-readers	Spaced repetition (FSRS)	Spaced-repetition review	Flashcards
Languages	English and German confirmed; check others	Dozens, no Chinese, Japanese or Korean	50+	23
US price	Pay per ebook and audiobook	Free; $4.99 or $7.99 a month	Free capped; $14.99 a month	Free tier; $7.99 a month

Readuet

This is the closest thing to Immersion Reading with the learning part added. A sentence lights up as the narrator reads it, and tapping any word gives a translation of that word in that sentence. The word is saved, then comes back for spaced-repetition review.

The free library has over 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages, every one graded from A2 to C2; about 580 are in English, 500 of them with a volunteer recording (free on books already prepared; a paid plan narrates the rest). You could start with the A2 shelf, Treasure Island at B1, or The Great Gatsby at B2. The free plan includes 25 translations a day once your first week is over; saved words don't count against it. For your own books, Solo ($4.99 a month or $29.99 a year) and Duet ($7.99 a month or $49.99 a year) align ebooks with audiobooks you already own, and both start with a free week.

Books you bought on Kindle or Audible stay in Amazon's apps, so they can't be uploaded. There's no Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and the library has older classics, not current bestsellers. It's on iPhone and iPad and in the browser; Android is in testing.

LingQ

LingQ is the better pick if your material is short, or if you're learning a language neither Amazon nor Readuet covers well. It has more than 50 languages, and it imports articles, videos and podcasts. A book, though, gets split into 2,000-word parts and turned into a course, so it's a weaker fit for a whole novel with its audiobook.

The US App Store lists Premium at $14.99 a month or $119.99 a year. The free plan caps you at 20 saved words, according to a September 2026 review by a competing language-learning company.

Beelinguapp

Beelinguapp suits beginners. It shows the story side by side with your own language, narrated, in 23 languages, with a section for children. It works with its own library, and we found no way to import your own books. The US App Store lists $7.99 a month or $49.90 a year.

Doing it by hand for free

You can read a Project Gutenberg text while playing the same book from LibriVox in another app. It costs nothing and works, as long as the narrator and the edition roughly match. You won't get a highlight or word lookup, and you'll have to find your own place. Our list of free audiobooks with text by level gives you somewhere to start.

Which should you use?

Stick with Immersion Reading if you're at a good level in English or German, want a current bestseller, and already own both formats or are happy to buy them. Nothing else here hands you a current book and its professional narration, already matched.
Pick Readuet if you want whole books, sentence-level sync and every word you look up coming back for review, and public-domain classics or your own ebook and audiobook files will do.
Pick LingQ if you mostly learn from short content, or need Japanese, Chinese or Korean.
Pick Beelinguapp if you're just starting and want the full translation beside the text.

If you already have a Kindle habit, you don't have to choose: read your bestseller on Kindle for pleasure, and use something built for learning for the book you're studying.

Frequently asked questions

Is Kindle Immersion Reading good for learning a language?

It's useful for connecting spelling with sound, and you can slow the narrator down. It's weaker on the rest: there's no scheduled vocabulary review, and lookups are general dictionary and translation tools. It works best when you already read fairly comfortably at the book's level.

What languages does Immersion Reading support?

Audible's sources differ. Its February 2026 launch announcement names English, German, Spanish, Italian and French; its Read & Listen page names English and German. We found no public list by language, so look for the Read & Listen badge on the exact title.

Does Immersion Reading work on a Kindle Paperwhite?

Audible's list of immersion reading devices doesn't include Kindle e-readers. Models from 2022 on support Read & Listen, which lets you switch between reading and listening without losing your place, but that's not the highlighted read-along.

Do I have to buy both the ebook and the audiobook?

Yes, you need both in your Kindle and Audible libraries. Owning the ebook can get you a discounted audiobook, and the size of the discount depends on the title. Kindle Unlimited doesn't always include the matching audiobook.

Is there a free alternative to Immersion Reading?

Yes. Readuet's free plan includes a library of over 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages, about 580 of them in English, with synced narration on the ones already prepared and 25 new words a day after your first week. You can also pair a Project Gutenberg text with a LibriVox recording by hand, without the highlight.

Can I use my Kindle or Audible books in Readuet?

Not directly: those stay in Amazon's apps. Readuet works with ebook and audio files you have, and with its own library. If you read on a Kindle, you can photograph a page and Readuet will find that place in its copy of the book.

How to learn a language with audiobooks (without just zoning out)

2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

You put on an audiobook in the language you're learning, start the washing-up, and twenty minutes later you realise you have no idea what has happened in the story. The voice kept going; you didn't. It feels like immersion, but very little of it is landing.

That isn't a lack of discipline. Listening is the format where attention slips most easily, and in a foreign language the slips cost more. The good news is that the fix is not to give up on audiobooks. It's to change how you use them. This post explains why the zoning out happens, then gives a routine that turns an audiobook into something you actually learn from.

Why audiobooks wash over you

Listening is the easiest way to drift off, even in your own language

In a study at the University of Waterloo, 211 students took in passages from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything three ways: reading silently, reading aloud and listening to the author read. Every 30 to 90 seconds they were asked whether their mind had wandered. While listening, they said yes to about half of those prompts. While reading silently it was about a third, and reading aloud was lower still. Listening also gave the worst scores on a memory test afterwards (Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek, 2013).

That doesn't make audiobooks a lesser way to take in a book. When 91 adults in another study listened to, read, or read and listened to a chapter of a non-fiction book, their comprehension came out the same in all three groups, both straight after and two weeks later (Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal, 2016). But it does mean that audio gives your attention more room to leave, and nothing stops the story when it does.

In a new language, one missed word loses the whole sentence

On a page you can stop at a word you don't know, look at it, and carry on. Speech doesn't wait. You also can't see where one word ends and the next begins, so a phrase you would recognise in print can go past as a blur. Lose a word and you are often still decoding it when the next sentence starts.

How much you need to know is measurable. In a study of listening, van Zeeland and Schmitt found that learners followed short, informal stories reasonably well when they knew about 95% of the words, roughly one unknown word in twenty (Applied Linguistics, 2013). Those were short recordings that learners heard more than once, so a long novel at full speed is a harder test. Below that, the audio stops being input and becomes noise.

Listening alone teaches very few words

In the best-known study of reading while listening, Japanese university students met 28 new words in each of three short graded readers. After only listening, they could recall the meaning of 0.56 of those words on average. After reading, or reading while listening, it was a little over four (Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua, 2008). We went through that study and a dozen others in what the research says about reading while listening.

The pattern is consistent: the audio is most useful when the text is in front of you. So the routine below is built around reading and listening together, with audio-only coming later, once you've seen the words.

The routine, step by step

1. Pick a book you can mostly read already

This matters more than anything else. Open the first page and count the words you don't know in a passage of about a hundred words. Up to five or so, you're in the right place. If it's ten or more, find something easier: you'll spend the whole time decoding and won't follow the story.

What tends to work:

Graded readers, books rewritten for a limited vocabulary, many of which come with audio.
Children's classics, which are short, concrete and often familiar already.
A book you've read in your own language. Knowing the plot frees your attention for the language.

If you're learning English, our list of free audiobooks with matching text by CEFR level has picks from A2 to C2. The gentlest are A2: Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. At B1, Treasure Island and The Call of the Wild are real novels that read easily.

2. Get the exact text the narrator is reading

An audiobook with the wrong text is nearly as hard as no text. Look out for three traps: abridged audiobooks, a different translation from the one in your ebook, and dramatisations with several actors and cut lines. In all three the words on the page drift away from what you hear.

Free sources where text and audio match:

LibriVox volunteers record public-domain books, and most book pages link to the text the reader used. Most of the catalog is English, but there are recordings in dozens of other languages. Three examples: Jules Verne's Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours in French (about 8 hours, text on Project Gutenberg), Kafka's Die Verwandlung in German (about 2 hours) and Benito Pérez Galdós's Marianela in Spanish (about 6 hours, text on Project Gutenberg).
Project Gutenberg has the full texts of many of those same books.

For newer books, Amazon's Immersion Reading highlights the text of a Kindle book while its Audible version plays, if you own both. We compared it with the language-learning apps in Readuet vs LingQ vs Beelinguapp vs Kindle.

3. First pass: read and listen at the same time

Keep your eyes on the text and let the narrator set the pace. When your attention wanders, the page shows you exactly where you lost the thread, which audio alone never does.

Resist pausing every few seconds. In a meta-analysis of 30 studies, reading while listening helped comprehension only in the studies where the pace was set for the reader, not where readers controlled it themselves (Clinton-Lisell, 2023). If you can't keep up, slow the narration down a notch instead of stopping and starting, and bring the speed back up as it gets easier.

4. Keep sessions short and finish on a chapter

Twenty or thirty minutes of real attention beats an hour of background noise. Stop at the end of a chapter or a scene, not mid-sentence, and say in one sentence what just happened, in the language you're learning if you can. If you can't, that's useful to know too: go back and listen to the last page again with the text.

5. Look up only what stops you or comes back

You will meet unknown words on every page, and that's fine. Look one up when you can't follow what's happening without it, or when it turns up for the third time. Everything else can go by. When you do look a word up, keep the sentence you found it in. A word you can see in its sentence is far easier to remember than one on a list.

6. Second pass: now listen without the text

This is where audio-only earns its place. A chapter you have already read and heard is one you can follow on a walk, on the bus or at the sink, because you already know what each word looks like. Brown and colleagues suggest exactly this order: read a passage, read it again while listening, then listen only.

7. Review the words a little every day

One book is not enough to make a word stick. In Brown and colleagues' study, most new words were gone from strict recall three months later, and the authors estimate that long-term retention takes considerably more than seven to nine encounters. Reading a lot helps, especially if you stay with one author or series, because the same words keep coming back.

The other half is deliberate review, spread out over time. A meta-analysis of 317 experiments found that spacing study sessions apart beats cramming them together, and that the longer you want to remember something, the longer the gaps should be (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006). That's what spaced-repetition apps such as Anki automate. Five minutes a day with the words from your book is plenty.

How to tell it's working

You look up fewer words per page than you did in the first chapter.
You follow the narrator at normal speed without the text, on chapters you've already read.
Words you saved start to look familiar when they turn up again in the book.
The next book at the same level feels easier, and the one above it starts to look possible.

If none of that is happening after a few weeks, the book is usually too hard. Step down a level; there's no prize for suffering through it.

Where Readuet fits

You can do all of the above with an ebook, an MP3 player and a dictionary. We built Readuet to take care of the fiddly parts. It lines the book up with its audiobook sentence by sentence, so the sentence being narrated is highlighted and you never lose your place; press and hold any sentence to have the narrator play from there, and slow the audio down when you need to. Tap a word to see what it means in that sentence. Saved words come back in spaced-repetition review, and meeting one again in a book you're reading counts as a review too.

The free plan includes a catalog of about 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages, graded from A2 to C2. Narration and read-along come free on the prepared ones (English books by level, and what to read in other languages). The paid plans add narration on the rest of the catalog and line up your own DRM-free ebook and audiobook. Readuet runs in the browser and on iPhone and iPad; an Android app is in testing.

Frequently asked questions

Can you learn a language just by listening to audiobooks?

Not efficiently, at least not until your listening is already good. In Brown and colleagues' study, learners recalled the meaning of about half a new word out of 28 after listening only, against about four after reading or reading while listening. Listening on its own is most useful as a second pass, on chapters you've already read with the text.

What level do I need to start learning with audiobooks?

What matters is knowing most of the words in the book, about 95% or more, rather than reaching a particular level. For most people that means graded readers or children's books first. In our English catalog, the easiest complete books are rated A2, and most real novels sit at B1 and above.

Should I listen at normal speed or slow it down?

Slow it down if you can't keep up, rather than pausing constantly. A slightly slower narrator you can follow is better practice than full speed you can't. Bring the speed back up as the book gets easier.

Should I read along in my native language instead?

No. A translation in front of you lets you follow the story without processing the language you're learning. If you need help, look up single words in context, or pick an easier book.

Where can I find free audiobooks with matching text?

LibriVox has free public-domain recordings, most in English but also in dozens of other languages, and most book pages link to the text the narrator read, often on Project Gutenberg. For English learners, we've sorted free audiobooks with matching text by CEFR level.

A reading diary for 13 classic school books you can read and listen to free

2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

English class often comes with a reading list, and the books on it tend to be old: Jekyll and Hyde, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, a Shakespeare play. That's demanding even when English is your first language. When it isn't, and you're fifteen and reading Fitzgerald in your second language, it can feel impossible.

Two old habits make it manageable. The first is a reading diary: a few lines after every chapter about what happened, what you think and which words you didn't know. The second is listening to the book while you read it. The narrator carries you through sentences you would otherwise stall on, and there is good evidence that it helps both understanding and vocabulary.

This post gives you both. First a diary template that works for any book, then 13 classics that are often set in school, sorted by CEFR level, each with questions for your diary. All 13 are in the public domain: the full text is on Project Gutenberg and a complete, unabridged recording is on LibriVox, so you can read and listen to every one of them free.

What a reading diary is

A reading diary (also called a reading journal or reading log) is a notebook where you write a little after each reading session. Teachers ask for one because it turns reading into something active: you notice more when you know you'll have to write about it. It also leaves you with notes for the class discussion or the essay at the end.

If you're reading in a foreign language, the diary does one more job. It's where the new words go, each with the sentence you found it in, so you can learn them in context instead of from a list.

A reading diary template for any book

Before you start

What do you already know about the book, its author or the time it was written?
Read the first page. What do you expect the book to be about?

After each chapter

What happened? Two or three sentences, in your own words.
Which character did you learn something new about, and what was it?
Copy out one sentence you liked or didn't understand, and say why.
Write one question you'd like to ask the author or one of the characters.
Note three new words, each with the sentence it came from.

When you finish

Did the ending match what you expected after the first page?
What is the book about underneath the plot?
Would you recommend it to someone in your class? Why, or why not?

Keep entries short. Five minutes after each chapter is worth more than one long essay written the night before the lesson.

How to read a set text in a language you're still learning

Listen while you read, from the first page. Let the narrator set the pace. If you keep falling behind, slow the audio down rather than stopping every few seconds.
Don't look up every word. Look up a word when it stops you understanding the sentence, or when it turns up for the third time.
Write the diary entry straight after the chapter. Write it in English if you can. Short, simple sentences are fine.
Reread the chapters you'll discuss in class. The second time through, you'll notice the things the questions ask about.

You can do all of this with a Gutenberg ebook, the LibriVox MP3s and a dictionary. In Readuet, every book below already has its text and audio lined up sentence by sentence, so the highlight follows the narrator. Tap any word for a translation that fits the sentence, and the words you save go into a daily review, which takes care of the "three new words" part of the diary. The whole free catalog, read-along included, is on the free plan, in the web app and on iPhone and Android.

B1: classics that read easily

At B1 you can follow a real novel written for a general audience. These three have clear plots and plenty of action. All B1 books

The Call of the Wild

Jack London · 3.6 hours · read by Tom Crawford · Read and listen free

Buck learns "the law of club and fang". What are its rules, and who teaches them to him?
Compare how Buck's owners treat their dogs: François and Perrault, then Hal, Charles and Mercedes, then John Thornton. What does each of them show about people?
At the end, is Buck going back to something or leaving something behind?
London tells the story from a dog's point of view. Where does that work well, and where did you notice the human writer behind it?

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson · 7.5 hours · read by Adrian Praetzellis · Read and listen free

Jim is a boy among grown men. When does he act more wisely than the adults, and when does he put everyone in danger?
Long John Silver is a liar and a mutineer, yet many readers like him. Why? Do you?
Jim tells the story years later, so you know he survived. How does Stevenson keep you in suspense anyway?
What has the treasure cost by the end? Was it worth it?

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain · 6.8 hours · read by John Greenman · Read and listen free

How does Tom get his friends to whitewash the fence for him? What does Twain say this shows about work and play?
Tom and Huck witness a murder in the graveyard. Why is it so hard for Tom to tell the truth, and why does he do it in the end?
Compare Tom and Huck. Who has more freedom, and whose life would you rather have?
Twain wrote for adults as well as children. Find a moment where the joke is on the grown-ups.

B2: the core of the reading list

B2 is where most adult classics become manageable. You'll still look words up, but most pages will make sense without them. All B2 books

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson · 3.1 hours · read by David Barnes · Read and listen free

This one has a complete chapter-by-chapter diary of its own, further down.

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 5.0 hours · read by Scotty Smith · Read and listen free

Nick calls himself one of the few honest people he has ever known. Do you trust him as a narrator?
What does the green light at the end of Daisy's dock mean to Gatsby? Does its meaning change by the end of the book?
Hundreds of people come to Gatsby's parties. Who comes to his funeral, and what does that tell you?
"Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!" Is Gatsby in love with Daisy, or with a memory of her?

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle · 13.5 hours · read by Ruth Golding · Read and listen free

The book is twelve separate stories, so you can read just the ones your class is studying. If you get to choose, start with "A Scandal in Bohemia" or "The Speckled Band".

Why does Conan Doyle have Watson tell the stories rather than Holmes himself?
In "A Scandal in Bohemia", Irene Adler outwits Holmes. Why does he call her "the woman" from then on?
Pick one story and list every clue before Holmes explains it. Could you have solved the case?
More than once, Holmes lets a guilty person go free. Is he right to?

The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells · 6.6 hours · read by Rebecca Dittman · Read and listen free

The Martians are defeated by bacteria, not by people. Why do you think Wells ended the story that way?
In the first chapter, the narrator compares the Martians' invasion to what Europeans did to the people of Tasmania. What point is he making?
Why does the narrator leave the artilleryman and his plans for life underground?
Read the opening paragraph twice. How does Wells make an invasion from Mars feel scientific and believable?

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Frederick Douglass · 4.0 hours · read by Jeanette Ferguson · Read and listen free

Douglass calls learning to read "the pathway from slavery to freedom". Why did slaveholders fear an enslaved person who could read?
The fight with Mr. Covey is a turning point. What changes in Douglass afterwards?
In the appendix, Douglass separates two kinds of Christianity. What is the difference, and why does it matter so much to him?
He chooses not to describe how he escaped. Why?

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen · 13.4 hours · read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg · Read and listen free

The first sentence is one of the most famous in English. Is Austen being serious? How can you tell?
Who is proud, and who is prejudiced? Can you argue it the other way round?
Darcy proposes the first time and Elizabeth refuses. What does each of them get wrong about the other?
Compare the marriages in the book: Mr and Mrs Bennet, Charlotte and Mr Collins, Lydia and Wickham, Jane and Bingley. What does Austen think makes a good one?

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde · 9.5 hours · read by Bob Neufeld · Read and listen free

Who is most to blame for what Dorian becomes: Lord Henry, Basil or Dorian himself?
Why does the portrait age instead of Dorian? What would the story lose without it?
Lord Henry is full of clever lines. Copy out two. Do you agree with either of them, or are they only clever?
How does Sibyl Vane's death change Dorian?

C1: long sentences, big ideas

C1 books have long sentences, formal vocabulary and narrators who don't always say what they mean. Seeing the text while you hear it makes a real difference here. All C1 books

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley · 7.4 hours · read by Caden Vaughn Clegg · Read and listen free

The story has three narrators: Walton, Victor and the creature. Whose account do you trust most?
The creature learns to speak and read by secretly watching the De Lacey family. What does he learn about people, and how does it change him?
Who is the real monster? Find evidence for both answers.
The book's subtitle is The Modern Prometheus. What is Shelley warning us about?

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë · 18.6 hours · read by Elizabeth Klett · Read and listen free

At Gateshead and at Lowood, Jane is treated unfairly. How does she respond to injustice as a child, and how as an adult?
"Reader, I married him." Why does Jane speak to the reader directly?
How is Bertha Mason described? What do you think of the way the novel treats her?
Jane leaves Thornfield with nowhere to go. Why, and was she right?

C2: Shakespeare

Shakespeare is hard for native speakers too. But a play is written to be heard, and following the lines while a reader speaks them is the easiest way in. All C2 books

Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare · 3.2 hours · read by Sam Stinson · Read and listen free

The Prologue tells you how the play ends. Why would Shakespeare give the ending away?
The lovers meet, marry and die within a few days. Is it love, or just haste? Friar Laurence warns, "Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast." Is he right?
Whose fault are the deaths: the families', the Friar's, bad luck, or Romeo and Juliet's own?
What does Mercutio mean by "A plague o' both your houses!"? Why is his death the turning point of the play?

A complete reading diary: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Jekyll and Hyde is short (ten chapters, about three hours of audio) and set on many reading lists, which makes it a good book for trying a full diary. You probably know the twist already. Stevenson's first readers didn't, so as you read, watch how the story keeps the secret until the end: who knows what, and when?

Chapter by chapter

Story of the Door. Enfield tells Utterson about a man who trampled a child. What is it about Hyde that disgusts people, and why can nobody describe him?
Search for Mr. Hyde. "If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek." Why is Utterson so worried about Jekyll's will?
Dr. Jekyll Was Quite at Ease. How does Jekyll react when Utterson brings up Hyde? What does that tell you?
The Carew Murder Case. Notice the fog and the London streets. How does the setting add to the mood?
Incident of the Letter. Mr. Guest compares two pieces of handwriting. What does Utterson suspect, and why does he keep quiet?
Remarkable Incident of Dr. Lanyon. Lanyon is dying after a shock and refuses to talk about Jekyll. What do you think he saw?
Incident at the Window. What do Utterson and Enfield see at the window, and what do they guess?
The Last Night. Poole and Utterson break down the door. What do they find, and what is still unexplained?
Dr. Lanyon's Narrative. We finally see the transformation. Why does Stevenson show it through Lanyon's eyes first?
Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case. Jekyll writes that "man is not truly one, but truly two". Do you agree? Was Hyde a different person, or Jekyll with no limits?

When you finish

Nearly every character is a respectable gentleman, and none of them says openly what he suspects. What does the book say about respectability?
Is Jekyll a victim, or is he responsible for everything that happens?
Write a diary entry as Poole, Jekyll's butler, on the last night.

Words you'll meet

Word	What it means here
will	the legal document saying who gets your money when you die
countenance	a person's face, or the expression on it
draught	a drink of medicine (Jekyll's potion)
Juggernaut	an unstoppable, crushing force (how Enfield describes Hyde)
cheque	a signed order to a bank to pay money

For teachers

It's all free. The text, the audio and the read-along for every book in this post are on Readuet's free plan. It runs in a browser at app.readuet.com, so school laptops and Chromebooks work, and there are iPhone and Android apps.
It's a reader, not a classroom platform. There are no class accounts, no teacher dashboard and no way to see a student's progress. Students sign up themselves, and our Terms require them to be at least 13. The diary itself stays on paper or in your usual learning platform.
Read the books before you set them. Tom Sawyer and the Douglass Narrative use the racist language of their time, and several of the others reflect the attitudes of theirs.
Teaching a classic that isn't here? Write to support@readuet.com and tell us which one. If there's a free recording of it, we'll consider it for a diary.

What's not here, and why

Many books on today's reading lists are still under copyright, among them To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies. There's no free text or recording of them. George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 are public domain in the UK and the EU but not in the United States, and LibriVox records only books that are public domain in the US, so they aren't in the free catalog either.

If you own an ebook and its audiobook, Readuet can put them in sync on a paid plan.

Frequently asked questions

What is a reading diary?

A notebook, paper or digital, where you write a few lines after each reading session: what happened, what you think about it, a quote and any new words. It's also called a reading journal or reading log.

Are these books really free?

Yes. The texts come from Project Gutenberg and the recordings from LibriVox, and all of them are in the public domain. You can download them from gutenberg.org and librivox.org, or read and listen to them together in Readuet on the free plan.

Are the audiobooks the full, unabridged text?

Yes. Each recording is matched to the Gutenberg edition it was read from, and abridged or dramatised versions are left out. Volunteers sometimes skip or repeat a line, and each recording starts with a short LibriVox announcement.

Which book should I start with?

If your class hasn't chosen one, pick the level below the one you feel at. The Call of the Wild is short and fast at B1, and Jekyll and Hyde is the shortest B2 book here.

Can I use these questions in class?

Yes, use them however you like. A link back to this page is appreciated but not required.

Readuet vs LingQ vs Beelinguapp vs Kindle Immersion Reading: an honest comparison

2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

We make Readuet, so read this with that in mind. We've tried to be fair, including about where the others beat us. Every competitor fact below comes from that company's own website or help pages, checked on 22 October 2026. Where a price wasn't shown to us (prices on these sites change by country), we say so instead of guessing.

Features and prices change. If you're reading this months from now, check each product's own site before deciding. If we got something wrong about your product, email support@readuet.com and we'll fix it.

The short version

All four let you read and listen at the same time. They differ in where the content comes from and what happens when you don't know a word.

Readuet lines up an ebook with its audiobook to the sentence, transcribes podcasts so you can read along with them too, and turns every tapped word into a vocabulary item with spaced-repetition review. A free library of over 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages; your own audiobooks on a paid plan.
LingQ is a mature learn-from-content platform built around lessons: a big library, importers for YouTube, Netflix, podcasts and articles, word tracking, more than 50 languages. Books go in too, but as a course of short lessons, not as a book.
Beelinguapp shows a story in your target language and your own language side by side, with narration from native speakers. Built for beginners and kids.
Kindle Immersion Reading highlights the text of a Kindle book while its Audible audiobook plays. It's for commercial books you buy from Amazon, not a language-learning tool.

Readuet

You add an ebook and its audiobook. Readuet transcribes the narration and aligns it with the text so that every sentence gets a start time, an end time and a confidence score. The sentence being read is the one that's lit; press and hold any sentence and choose Play from here to send the narrator there.

Tap any word and you get a translation of that word in that sentence, not a dictionary list. The word is saved under its dictionary form, so in ten languages (including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch and Ukrainian) learning one form covers the others. Saved words are tinted by CEFR level and move through a five-step familiarity ladder; due words come back as flashcards scheduled by FSRS, and meeting a word in a real book without tapping it counts as a review too.

The free plan includes our library of over 2,700 public-domain books in English, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Portuguese and Ukrainian, each labelled with a CEFR reading level. Texts come from Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and Wolne Lektury, and over 1,100 of the books have a volunteer recording from LibriVox or Wolne Lektury. Tap-to-translate and review are free on all of them, and so are narration and read-along on the books already prepared. You can upload your own ebooks for free too. Paying is for audio: Solo ($4.99/month or $29.99/year) narrates any library book and lines your own EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 or TXT up with your MP3, M4B and so on when you ask, by tapping a sentence or pausing; Duet ($7.99/month or $49.99/year) gives you the live highlight on your own uploads, reading along about 30 seconds after you upload, transcribes any podcast episode so you can read along with it, and adds a daily story built from words you owe reviews on. Both paid plans start with a free week.

It runs in the browser at app.readuet.com and on iPhone; the Android app isn't out yet. KOReader can use Readuet as its progress-sync server, and for Kindle you can photograph a page and Readuet finds that spot in the book.

Where we're weak: our library is about 2,700 books, not tens of thousands of lessons. Chinese, Japanese and Korean aren't supported, nor are PDFs. Grouping word forms by dictionary form covers ten languages; others fall back to exact matching. And we don't sell books: for your own uploads you need to own both the ebook and the audiobook already.

LingQ

LingQ's homepage pitches learning "with shows, podcasts, and books you love" in more than 50 languages. Its unit is the lesson: a text, usually with audio, from its library (tens of thousands of lessons across news, culture and entertainment) or one you import. A browser extension turns YouTube videos, Netflix episodes, podcasts and articles into lessons, and LingQ's AI tools add transcripts, translations and generated audio.

Looking up a word

Words you have never seen are shown in blue. Click one and a panel opens with a few candidate meanings: meanings other learners saved for that word (LingQ calls them hints), integrated dictionaries, and, since 2024, an AI meaning based on the sentence, which can be turned off in the reader settings. You pick one, or write your own, and the word becomes a yellow "LingQ" saved with the phrase you found it in (LingQ help). Turn the page and the blue words you didn't click are marked known by default.

In Readuet a tap shows one translation of the word in its sentence, under the word itself, and saves it. There's no list to choose from. That is less flexible (you can't pick another learner's wording) but it's one step instead of two.

Books on LingQ

You can import an ebook, but it doesn't stay a book. LingQ's own guide says an imported ebook "will automatically get split into 2000 word parts and turned into a course" (LingQ blog, updated September 2025). Learners on LingQ's forum complain that the split ignores chapters, and that headings, paragraphs, emphasis and images are lost (forum thread, May 2024). A full-length novel becomes dozens of lessons of plain text.

Audio is per lesson too. You can attach an audio file to a lesson and have LingQ generate timestamps for it, and it asks that the text match the audio exactly (LingQ help). There's no step that takes one audiobook and lines it up with a whole imported book. LingQ's own ebook guide calls cutting an audiobook into lesson-sized pieces "quite tedious" and suggests listening in another app instead. Without your own audio, lessons use text-to-speech.

Pricing: the free plan is capped. LingQ's help centre says free accounts can create 20 LingQs (saved words), and LingQ's own comparison lists 5 imported lessons and 1 audio playlist, with flashcard quizzes and offline access on Premium only. The pricing page showed us prices in Polish złoty (geo-dependent): Premium 47.99 zł a month or 379.99 zł a year, Premium Plus 102.99 zł a month or 899.99 zł a year. In US dollars, LingQ's blog (August 2026) gives $14.99 a month or $10 a month billed annually, and the US App Store lists Premium at $14.99 a month and $119.99 a year. Check the current price for your country.

Where LingQ is better than Readuet: far more languages, Asian languages included; a huge lesson library plus import from video, podcasts and the web, which we don't do; community meanings to choose from; an active community; years of polish; Android, iOS and web all available today. If your material is short pieces rather than whole books, LingQ is built for exactly that.

Beelinguapp

Beelinguapp's idea is parallel text: the story in the language you're learning, with your own language beside it to peek at when you get lost. Many stories are narrated by native speakers, and the App Store listing describes "karaoke-style scrolling text" synced to the audio. The site says content is translated and narrated in 23 languages, and there is a BeKids section of illustrated children's books with simplified sentences. You can add words to a glossary and practise them with flashcards. The FAQ says a text you open is downloaded for offline reading.

As far as we could find, Beelinguapp works with its own library; we found no option to import your own books. Its FAQ names Android and iPhone; we didn't see a web version mentioned.

Looking up a word happens inside that parallel layout: you select a word to add it to your glossary, and the full translation of the passage is a swipe away. (App Store reviewers describe pressing and holding a word for its translation and pronunciation; we didn't find this in Beelinguapp's own help.)

Pricing isn't shown on beelinguapp.com. The US App Store lists Beelinguapp Monthly at $7.99 and Yearly at $49.90, plus several promotional tiers. The FAQ says Premium unlocks all content, lets you change languages at any time, and removes ads.

Where Beelinguapp is better than Readuet: side-by-side full translations are a gentler start for absolute beginners than tapping word by word; it has content written for kids; it covers languages we don't.

Kindle Immersion Reading (Whispersync for Voice)

Amazon now calls the sync feature Read & Listen, "formerly called Whispersync for Voice". Immersion Reading is the read-along part: in Amazon's words, the text "highlights as the narrator reads". It works when you have both the Kindle eBook and the Audible audiobook of the same title; Amazon's help also says that to use Immersion Reading in the Kindle apps, titles must be purchased, not borrowed. If you own the ebook, Amazon offers the matching audiobook at a discount ("Add Audible narration"). The discount varies by title.

Where it works: Amazon documents Immersion Reading in the Kindle apps on iPhone, Android and iPad, and on Fire tablets with Fire OS 7 or later. For Kindle e-readers, Amazon's help describes switching between reading and listening without losing your place (Audible's help lists e-readers from 2022 on), not the highlighted read-along.

There is no language-learning layer on top of the read-along. Kindle's normal lookup still works: select a word and you get a dictionary entry, Wikipedia and a machine-translation card, and on e-readers looked-up words go into Vocabulary Builder flashcards. There's no review scheduling, and the translation card translates the word or phrase you selected, not the word as used in that sentence. Language coverage depends on which books are sold as matched pairs in your store; we couldn't find a published list.

Where Kindle is better than Readuet: the current commercial catalogue, bestsellers included, with professional narration and pairs that are matched for you; it's built into a device and ecosystem millions of people already own; there's nothing to upload.

Side by side

Feature	Readuet	LingQ	Beelinguapp	Kindle Immersion Reading
Synced audio and text	Whole audiobook to whole book, every sentence timed	Per lesson: upload audio, generate timestamps	Karaoke-style scrolling text	Highlight follows narrator
Your own content	Whole EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, TXT (free), with its audiobook (paid)	Web, video, podcasts; ebooks split into ~2,000-word lessons	Not found	Kindle plus Audible purchases only
Free content	About 2,700 public-domain books in 10 languages, narration on prepared ones	Lesson library (free plan capped)	Some stories; Premium unlocks all	None; both halves bought
Word lookup	One tap: translation of the word in its sentence, saved	Click: pick from community, dictionary and AI meanings	Full translation side by side; glossary	Dictionary, Wikipedia, machine translation
Vocabulary and review	5-step ladder, FSRS flashcards	LingQs, SRS review	Glossary, flashcards	Vocabulary Builder (e-readers)
Languages	Dozens; no CJK	50+	23	Depends on store catalogue
Platforms	Web, iPhone; Android soon	iOS, Android, web	iOS, Android	Kindle apps, Fire tablets
Offline	Downloaded books	Premium	Opened texts	Downloaded titles
Price	Free; $4.99 or $7.99 a month	Free capped; ~$14.99 a month	Free; ~$7.99 a month (App Store)	Pay per ebook and audiobook

Prices are US list prices as of 22 October 2026 and vary by country.

Who should pick which

Pick Kindle Immersion Reading if the book you want is a current bestseller, you already live in Amazon's ecosystem, and you're reading in a language you're already comfortable in. Nothing beats a professionally matched pair you can buy in one click.
Pick Beelinguapp if you're just starting a language, or choosing for a child, and want the full translation beside the text rather than looking things up word by word.
Pick LingQ if you're learning a language we don't cover (Japanese, Chinese or Korean, say), or your material is short: YouTube, Netflix, podcasts, news and articles, with a big community around you. It's a weaker fit for reading a whole novel with its audiobook.
Pick Readuet if you want to read whole books while listening, matched sentence by sentence, with every word you tap becoming a word you'll actually review. That goes double if you already have your ebooks and audiobooks as files, or are happy with public-domain classics, which cost nothing.

Plenty of people will happily use two of these.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to buy the ebook and the audiobook for Kindle Immersion Reading?

Yes. Amazon's help says you need both the Kindle eBook and the Audible audiobook, and that titles must be purchased to use Immersion Reading in the Kindle apps. If you own the ebook, Amazon often offers the audiobook at a discount.

Does Kindle Immersion Reading work on a Kindle Paperwhite?

Amazon documents the highlighted read-along in the Kindle apps for phones and tablets and on Fire tablets. For Kindle e-readers it describes switching between reading and listening, not highlighting while you listen. Check Amazon's help for your exact model.

Can I use Readuet with books I bought on Kindle or Audible?

Not directly: books bought on Kindle or Audible stay in Amazon's apps. Readuet works with EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2 or TXT and audio files you have, and with the free public-domain library. If you read on a Kindle, you can photograph a page and Readuet will find that place in its copy of the book.

Is Readuet a replacement for LingQ?

For some people. If what you want is whole books with their audiobook, read along sentence by sentence, Readuet does that and LingQ doesn't: on LingQ a book becomes a course of ~2,000-word lessons, each with its own audio. If you need Asian languages, want to import YouTube or Netflix, or value LingQ's community and lesson library, LingQ covers more ground.

What does Readuet cost?

The free plan has no time limit: the public-domain library with tap-to-translate and spaced-repetition review, read-along on the books already prepared, and your own ebooks. Solo is $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year and adds narration for any library book and your own audiobooks; Duet is $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year and adds the live highlight on your own uploads, podcast transcription for read-along, and today's story. Both paid plans start with a free week.

Reading while listening: what the research says about audiobooks

2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

We build an app that plays an audiobook while you read the same text, so we have an obvious interest in this method working. That is a good reason to be careful. We went back to the studies people usually cite and read what they measured, how many learners took part and what the authors say about their own limits.

The short version: reading while listening (researchers call it RWL, or audio-assisted reading) helps second-language learners. It helps most with comprehension and listening, and with some vocabulary. It is not magic. One pass through a book teaches you very few new words, and that held across every study we read.

What the research means by "reading while listening"

In these studies, learners read a text while a recording of the same text plays. That is usually a graded reader (a book rewritten for a limited vocabulary) narrated by a native speaker. It is compared with reading silently, with listening only, or with both. Most studies are in English as a foreign language, and most of the participants are university or secondary-school students in East Asia.

The vocabulary studies

Brown, Waring and Donkaewbua (2008)

This is the study everyone cites, and it is open access. Thirty-five Japanese university students at pre-intermediate to intermediate level each met three Oxford Bookworms readers at the 400-headword level. They read one, read and listened to another, and only listened to the third. The narration ran at 93 words per minute. Each book had 28 target words, which the researchers swapped for made-up substitute words so nobody could already know them.

On the strictest test, writing down a word's meaning unprompted straight after the session, learners got 4.39 of the 28 words after reading while listening, 4.10 after reading only and 0.56 after listening only. On a multiple-choice test the numbers were higher: 13.31, 12.54 and 8.20. The difference between reading only and reading while listening was not statistically significant. Listening only was clearly worse than both.

Three months later the unprompted-recall scores were down to about one word per book in either reading mode, and almost none for listening only. The authors called this "a disappointing rate of return considering the effort involved". They add that the multiple-choice scores held up much better, which suggests a lot of partial knowledge that the strict test could not detect. Words that came up more often were more likely to be learned and less likely to be forgotten. The authors suggest that long-term retention probably needs "considerably higher than seven to nine" encounters.

Learners' preferences were clearer than the score differences. In their written feedback, 72% preferred reading while listening, 28% preferred reading only, and nobody clearly preferred listening only. In informal interviews, some said the narrator did the work of breaking the sentences into chunks for them.

Studies that found a reading-while-listening advantage

Webb and Chang (2012) followed 82 Taiwanese learners aged 15 to 16 over two seven-week periods of repeated reading of 28 short texts. Reading with audio led to significantly greater vocabulary knowledge than reading without it.
Webb and Chang (2015) studied 61 Taiwanese learners, some in an extensive reading program with audio and some in a regular coursebook class. After reading and listening to 10 graded readers, relative gains on 100 target words were 44.06%, and 36.66% three months later. How often a word appeared did not significantly predict whether it was learned, and the authors conclude frequency is "perhaps one of many factors".
Teng (2018) compared reading only with reading while listening for 60 Chinese learners on 24 target words. More words were learned in the reading-while-listening condition. Frequency of exposure mattered for word form and grammar, but not for meaning or collocation.
Malone (2018) gave 80 intermediate learners texts with each new word appearing two or four times, with or without audio. Some learning was measurable after just two encounters, and the audio made a difference to how well learners connected a word's form to its meaning.
Vu and Peters (2021) looked at collocations, meaning word pairs like make a decision, with 100 Vietnamese learners over nine weeks. Reading while listening beat reading only, but reading with the target phrases underlined beat both.

Comprehension and listening fluency

Chang and Millett (2014) gave three groups ten graded readers over 13 weeks in one of three modes. The reading-while-listening group showed the most consistent gains in listening fluency, measured by passages played once at a fixed speed.
Chang and Millett (2015) compared audio-assisted and silent extensive reading for beginner learners. Both groups improved reading speed and comprehension, the audio group more so, and the gains held at a three-month delayed test.
Woodall (2010) had basic-level learners at a university in Puerto Rico read Charlotte's Web. The 69 who also listened outscored the 68 who read silently on all eight weekly comprehension quizzes, significantly so on four. Reading-fluency data showed no clear trend.
Gobel and Kano (2014) ran a year-long reading-while-listening program for 230 Japanese first-year students. Reading rate and vocabulary recognition improved significantly, but general proficiency (TOEFL) did not. Many students had negative attitudes toward the program and its software, and that cut how much work they did.
Hui (2024) tested 46 learners at an American university. Reading while listening gave better comprehension than listening only, but no better than reading only.

An eye-tracking study by Conklin and colleagues (2020) adds a detail: readers generally do not look at the word they are hearing, but slightly ahead of it, which the authors suggest may explain some of the benefit.

What the meta-analyses add

Clinton-Lisell (2023) pooled 30 studies (1,945 participants, first- and second-language readers) comparing reading while listening with reading only on comprehension. The overall benefit was small: g = 0.18, which the author calls trivial. It appeared only in studies where the experimenter set the pace (g = 0.41). When readers controlled their own pace, there was no reliable effect (g = 0.06). For second-language vocabulary, the two studies in the sample had large effects, but the author warns that two studies are too few to generalise from.

Webb, Uchihara and Yanagisawa (2023) pooled 24 studies of incidental vocabulary learning with 2,771 participants. Average gains were similar for reading (17% of target words on immediate tests, 15% on delayed tests), listening (15%, 13%) and reading while listening (13%, 17%). Viewing came lower (7%, 5%). But only two of the studies were about reading while listening, so that row of the table rests on very little data.

The honest limits

Small, narrow samples. Most of the studies above had between 35 and 100 learners (the largest, Gobel and Kano, had 230). They were mostly university students in Japan, Taiwan, China or Vietnam, and mostly learning English.
Short exposure. Many studies use one text, or a few, per condition. Brown and colleagues point out that each learner met only about 5,500 words per mode.
Graded readers, not real books. Almost all of the materials were simplified texts or short passages with careful narration. We found little evidence either way on unabridged novels at natural speed.
Words need many encounters. Single books give single-digit gains on strict tests, and those gains fade without more exposure.
The test changes the answer. In Brown and colleagues' study, the same learners scored about three times higher on multiple choice than on unprompted recall.
Listening only is the weakest mode in almost every comparison, at least for learners whose reading is ahead of their listening.

How to use reading while listening well

Pick text you can mostly read already. Brown and colleagues chose books in which 95% or more of the running words were known. If you are tapping every third word, step down a level.
Let the audio set the pace, but not too fast. In the meta-analysis, the comprehension benefit showed up only when readers did not control the pace, which is what happens when the narration sets the speed. If you lose the thread, slow the narration down rather than giving up on it. Brown and colleagues suggest that learners whose listening lags behind their reading should listen at a slower speed or an easier level.
Re-read and re-listen. Repeated reading with audio is where Webb and Chang (2012) found gains. Brown and colleagues suggest a sequence: read a passage, read it again while listening, then listen only.
Read a lot, in the same author or genre. Words have to come back to stick, and staying in one author, series or genre brings them back naturally.
Look up sparingly, then keep what you looked up. Stopping for every word breaks the flow. But in Brown and colleagues' study, most words met in a single book were gone from strict recall three months later, so save the ones that matter.
Review on purpose. Incidental learning gives you a first, fragile trace of a word. Spaced review is how you turn it into a word you actually know.

Where Readuet fits

We built Readuet around this routine. You read an ebook while its audiobook plays, and the sentence being narrated is highlighted. You can press and hold a sentence to go back and hear it again, and change the playback speed. Tapping a word gives a translation in its context. Saved words move along a five-step familiarity scale and come back in FSRS spaced-repetition review. Meeting a saved word again in a book counts as a review too. There is also a free catalog of about 2,700 public-domain books in ten languages, about 1,200 of them with a recording, each tagged with a CEFR level so you can choose one you can actually read. It runs in the browser at app.readuet.com and on iPhone, with Android coming soon. Nothing in the research above was a study of Readuet, so treat it as a tool for applying what the studies found, not as proof.

References

Brown, R., Waring, R., and Donkaewbua, S. (2008). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20(2), 136–163. nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/item/174
Chang, A. C-S., and Millett, S. (2014). The effect of extensive listening on developing L2 listening fluency: some hard evidence. ELT Journal, 68(1), 31–40. doi:10.1093/elt/cct052
Chang, A. C-S., and Millett, S. (2015). Improving reading rates and comprehension through audio-assisted extensive reading for beginner learners. System, 52, 91–102. doi:10.1016/j.system.2015.05.003
Clinton-Lisell, V. (2023). Does reading while listening to text improve comprehension compared to reading only? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Research: Theory and Practice, 34(3), 133–155. ERIC full text
Conklin, K., Alotaibi, S., Pellicer-Sánchez, A., and Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, L. (2020). What eye-tracking tells us about reading-only and reading-while-listening in a first and second language. Second Language Research, 36(3), 257–276. doi:10.1177/0267658320921496
Gobel, P., and Kano, M. (2014). Implementing a year-long reading while listening program for Japanese university EFL students. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 27(4), 279–293. doi:10.1080/09588221.2013.864314
Hui, B. (2024). Scaffolding comprehension with reading while listening and the role of reading speed and text complexity. The Modern Language Journal, 108(1), 183–200. doi:10.1111/modl.12905
Malone, J. (2018). Incidental vocabulary learning in SLA: Effects of frequency, aural enhancement, and working memory. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3), 651–675. doi:10.1017/S0272263117000341
Teng, F. (2018). Incidental vocabulary acquisition from reading-only and reading-while-listening: a multi-dimensional approach. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 12(3), 274–288. doi:10.1080/17501229.2016.1203328
Vu, D. V., and Peters, E. (2021). Incidental learning of collocations from meaningful input: A longitudinal study into three reading modes and factors that affect learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 44(3), 685–707. doi:10.1017/S0272263121000462
Webb, S., and Chang, A. C-S. (2012). Vocabulary learning through assisted and unassisted repeated reading. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 68(3), 267–290. doi:10.3138/cmlr.1204.1
Webb, S., and Chang, A. C-S. (2015). Second language vocabulary learning through extensive reading with audio support: How do frequency and distribution of occurrence affect learning? Language Teaching Research, 19(6), 667–686. doi:10.1177/1362168814559800
Webb, S., Uchihara, T., and Yanagisawa, A. (2023). How effective is second language incidental vocabulary learning? A meta-analysis. Language Teaching, 56(2), 161–180. doi:10.1017/S0261444822000507
Woodall, B. (2010). Simultaneous listening and reading in ESL: Helping second language learners read (and enjoy reading) more efficiently. TESOL Journal, 1(2), 186–205. doi:10.5054/tj.2010.220151

Frequently asked questions

Is reading while listening better than just reading?

Sometimes, by a little. For vocabulary, several studies found an advantage for reading while listening, while the best-known one (Brown and colleagues, 2008) found no significant difference from reading alone. For comprehension, a meta-analysis of 30 studies found a small overall benefit, and only in studies where readers did not control the pace. Learners in several studies preferred it, though, and a method you enjoy is one you keep using.

Can I learn a language just by listening to audiobooks?

Listening only was the weakest mode in nearly every comparison we read. In Brown and colleagues' study, learners recalled the meaning of 0.56 of 28 new words after listening only, against about four after either kind of reading. Adding the text makes the speech much easier to follow, especially when your reading is ahead of your listening.

What level should the book be?

Easy enough that you already know almost all the words. The studies mostly used graded readers where about 95% or more of the running words were known. If the book is much harder, you spend your attention decoding instead of following the story, and you won't pick up much vocabulary in passing.

Should I slow the audio down?

If you can't keep up, yes. Brown and colleagues ran their narration at 93 words per minute and recommend that learners whose listening lags behind their reading use a slower speed or an easier text. As you get better, bring the speed back up.

How many times do I need to meet a word to learn it?

More than one book usually gives you. Brown and colleagues estimate that long-term retention probably takes considerably more than seven to nine encounters. Webb and Chang (2015) found that frequency alone did not predict learning. That is why we pair reading with deliberate spaced review rather than relying on exposure alone.

Free audiobooks with matching text for English learners, by CEFR level (A2–C2)

2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

A good way to get through a book in a language you're still learning is to read it and listen to it at once. The audio sets the pace and shows you how words are pronounced. The text lets you see the words the narrator runs together. And when you look up a word, you have the whole sentence in front of you, not a sound that's already gone.

The difficulty is finding a recording and a text that are actually the same book. Plenty of the free "audiobooks with text" online are abridged, retold or dramatised, so the words on the page drift away from what you hear.

Public-domain classics avoid that. Project Gutenberg has the full texts, and LibriVox volunteers have recorded thousands of those same texts word for word. Below are the pairs we'd recommend for each CEFR level, all taken from the free catalog in Readuet. This list covers English. For German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian, see what to read at each level.

How we assign the CEFR level

The CEFR scale runs from A1 (beginner) to C2 (near-native). It describes learners, not books, so matching a book to a level is a judgement call.

We set each band by hand, one work at a time. We don't run a formula over the text. The question we ask is how hard the language is for a learner, which comes down to four things:

Vocabulary rarity: how many words are outside the most common few thousand.
Sentence length and structure: short and direct, or long with clauses inside clauses.
Archaism: how much 18th- and 19th-century usage you'll run into ("thee", "ere", "I dare say").
Dialect: phonetically spelled speech, which is hard to read even when the words underneath are simple.

The band is not an age rating and doesn't measure literary depth. Treasure Island is B1 because it reads easily. Moby Dick is C2 because it doesn't.

Some limits you should know about:

It's an estimate. One band covers the whole book, though dialogue is often easier than the narration around it.
Older English is harder than it looks. A Victorian novel that uses mostly common words can still be slow going because of its long sentences and formal phrasing.
Translated works (Andersen, Verne, Dostoyevsky) are rated on the English translation, which is often a 19th-century one.
There are no A1 books in the catalog yet. Real novels, even children's classics, are hard to follow at A1. The easiest titles below are A2.
Not every book comes with free read-along in Readuet. As of October 2026 the catalog has about 580 English books and all of them have a band, but narration and read-along are free only on books that are already prepared, marked ⚡ in the app. On the rest, the text is free and the narration comes with a paid plan. The LibriVox recordings themselves are always free at librivox.org.

About the recordings. LibriVox audiobooks are read by volunteers, so the quality varies. Most of the books listed here have a single narrator, and many of those narrators are excellent. A few are group projects where each chapter has a different reader (we point those out below). Listen to the first chapter before you settle in.

English, A2: first full books

There are only a handful of A2 titles, but they're good ones: short chapters, plenty of repetition, and stories you probably already know in your own language.

Title	Author	Length	Why it's a good pick
Winnie-the-Pooh	A. A. Milne	2.9 h	Short, gentle and funny. Each chapter is a self-contained adventure.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum	3.7 h	Plain, direct prose and a story everybody knows.
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz	L. Frank Baum	4.4 h	Same style and characters. A natural second book once you've finished Oz.
Andersen's Fairy Tales	Hans Christian Andersen	5.9 h	Short tales you can finish in one sitting. A group recording with several readers.
Grimms' Fairy Tales	Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm	11.1 h	Long overall, but each tale is only a few minutes. Good for a daily habit.

English, B1: classic adventures that read easily

At B1 you can read real novels written for a general audience. Pick something with a clear plot and not too many characters.

Title	Author	Length	Why it's a good pick
The Happy Prince, and Other Tales	Oscar Wilde	1.7 h	Wilde's fairy tales: simple sentences, beautiful rhythm, very short.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	3.0 h	Short, and the wordplay rewards rereading. A group recording with several readers.
The Call of the Wild	Jack London	3.6 h	Fast and concrete, with lots of action and not much description.
The Time Machine	H. G. Wells	3.7 h	A short novel with one narrator telling one story, and an easy way into science fiction.
Black Beauty	Anna Sewell	5.7 h	Simple first-person storytelling with short chapters.
Treasure Island	Robert Louis Stevenson	7.5 h	The classic pirate story. Expect some sailors' slang, but the plot carries you through it.

Other B1 books in the catalog include The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, The Secret Garden and Anne of Green Gables.

English, B2: the big shelf

B2 has the most titles in the catalog. This is where adult classics become manageable. You'll still look words up, but most pages will make sense without them.

Title	Author	Length	Why it's a good pick
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	Washington Irving	1.4 h	A complete classic in one evening. The descriptions are rich, so take it slowly.
The Importance of Being Earnest	Oscar Wilde	1.8 h	A comedy that is almost all quick dialogue. A group recording with several readers.
A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens	2.7 h	The most approachable Dickens, and short.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson	3.1 h	Short and tense. You'll want to know what happens next.
A Study in Scarlet	Arthur Conan Doyle	4.2 h	The first Sherlock Holmes story. Clear prose, and the plot keeps moving.
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	5.0 h	Published in 1925, so the English feels much more modern than the rest of this shelf.

The B2 shelf also has most of Jane Austen, more Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray. If you want something long, try Pride and Prejudice (13.4 h) or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (11.3 h). Be warned that Huck Finn is written in heavy dialect, which makes it harder than its band suggests.

English, C1: dense prose, big ideas

C1 books have long sentences, a wide vocabulary and narrators who sometimes leave things unsaid.

Title	Author	Length	Why it's a good pick
A Modest Proposal	Jonathan Swift	0.5 h	Thirty minutes of the most famous satire in English. Good for practising irony.
Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	4.2 h	Short but dense. Seeing the text while you listen makes Conrad far easier to follow.
The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	5.7 h	A ghost story told in long, winding sentences. Following the syntax is half the challenge.
Dubliners	James Joyce	6.7 h	Fifteen short stories. Read one, review its words, then move on.
Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	7.4 h	Formal, emotional prose, and a story most people know only from films.

You'll also find Dickens's big novels (Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities), the Brontës, Crime and Punishment and The Odyssey at C1.

English, C2: for when you want a fight

These books are hard for native speakers too. Many are poetry or drama, where word order bends and vocabulary comes from four centuries ago.

Title	Author	Length	Why it's a good pick
Songs of Innocence and of Experience	William Blake	0.7 h	Short poems with simple-looking words and deep meaning. Ideal for slow reading.
Shakespeare's Sonnets	William Shakespeare	0.7 h	Fourteen lines at a time. A group recording with several readers.
Hamlet	William Shakespeare	4.1 h	Reading the lines while you hear them is the easiest way into Shakespeare.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	James Joyce	9.1 h	The style grows more complex as the narrator grows up.
Moby Dick	Herman Melville	24.6 h	The big one: huge vocabulary, a lot of whaling detail, and some unforgettable chapters.

How to use them

Choose one level below where you'd like to be. Reading for pleasure works best when you understand most of each page without looking anything up.
Listen while you read, from the first page. Let the narrator set the pace. If you fall behind, slow the audio down rather than stopping every few seconds.
Look up only the words that keep appearing. One unknown word per paragraph is normal. If a word turns up for the third time, it's worth learning.
Review a few minutes a day. Spaced repetition means you see a word again just before you'd forget it. A few minutes every day works better than a long session once a week.

You can do all of this with a Gutenberg ebook, the LibriVox MP3s and a dictionary. Readuet takes care of the fiddly parts. Each catalog book comes with the text and audio already lined up sentence by sentence, so the highlight follows the narrator. Tap any word to get a translation that fits the sentence, and the words you save go into a review queue. The whole catalog is free to read on the free plan, and read-along is free on prepared books, marked ⚡: app.readuet.com.

Frequently asked questions

Are these audiobooks really free?

Yes. The texts come from Project Gutenberg and the recordings from LibriVox, and both are in the public domain. You can download them directly from gutenberg.org and librivox.org, or read them in Readuet on the free plan, with narration on prepared books.

Is the audio the same as the text, word for word?

That's the aim, and it's why we chose them. We match each LibriVox recording to the specific Gutenberg edition it was read from, and we reject abridgements and dramatised readings. Volunteers do sometimes skip or repeat a line, and each recording starts with a short LibriVox announcement. If a book's audio and text drift apart, tell us and we'll pull it.

How accurate are the CEFR levels?

They're careful estimates, not test results. We set each one by hand, based on vocabulary, sentence length, archaic language and dialect. The same book can feel a level easier or harder depending on your native language and on how much older English you've read before.

Why is there nothing at A1?

Complete books are a stretch at A1, even ones written for children, and none of the few we rated A1 is in the catalog yet. If you're just starting out, the A2 books above are the gentlest we can recommend. Short children's stories or graded readers are a better place to begin.

Do I need to understand every word?

No. If you understand most of the words on a page, you can follow the story and still pick up new vocabulary from context. If you're stopping in every sentence, try a book one level lower.