How to learn a language with books and audiobooks: what to read at each level
Free books with matching audio in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese and Russian, sorted by level, and how to use them in Readuet.
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.