Add the words you meet. Study the ones that stick.
Drop in a book, paste a URL, snap a page. Read it in the app and tap any word to translate and add. Lemnly schedules the reviews with FSRS — so you only see the words at the edge of your memory.
Free in beta · English ↔ German & Spanish today, more on the way
How it works
Two steps. Add. Study.
Whatever you’re looking at, paste it, drop it, photograph it, or say it. Lemnly does the boring bit. You do the five minutes a day.
Pick one of four ways in.
Same import preview underneath all four. Lemnly tokenises and lemmatises the text, checks against the shared cache and your own history, and proposes only the words you don’t already know.
Open the app. Hit Start.
Today’s queue is whatever FSRS thinks is at the edge of your memory. Forward direction, reverse direction, or both. Five modes to keep it varied.
What Lemnly does today
Add words from anything. Study them five ways.
Every feature listed below is shipping. If something’s missing, it’s because it isn’t built yet — not because we’re hiding it.
Add words from any URL
Paste a link to an article. Lemnly pulls the text, finds the words you don’t already know, and proposes cards.
Drop in EPUB, DOCX, TXT
Whole books, chapters, exported notes. Same import preview, same drip-fed cards.
Snap a page
Take a photo of any printed page. The AI reads it, you tap the words to keep.
Speak words in
Say a word out loud. Voice-to-text adds it to your bulk-add queue. Great for words you hear, not read.
Reading Mode
Read the parsed text right in the app. Tap a word for the translation, tap again to add it to your deck — without leaving the page.
FSRS scheduling, both directions
Modern spaced-repetition scheduler. Review front→back and back→front independently — recognition and recall are different skills.
Five ways to study
Flashcard, typing, listening, multiple-choice, letter-jumble. Same cards, the practice mode that fits the moment.
Subscribe to public decks
Borrow someone else’s frequency list, book vocabulary or exam pack. The cards land in your library — and when the author improves them, your version updates too.
Shared vocabulary cache
When a word has already been labelled by another learner, the gloss and example sentence are free. No AI cost, instant import.
Add a mnemonic image
Stuck on a word? Attach an image — your own or AI-generated — and it’ll stick faster on the next review.
Listening mode
Hear the word, type or pick the translation. Trains the half of vocabulary that reading doesn’t.
Streaks, kept honest
A streak you can actually maintain. Counts the weeks you reviewed at least a few days — not a hammer for missing a single day.
The rhythm
Five minutes, in the cracks of your day.
Lemnly is built for the time you already have — not another thing to schedule. Add a word when you meet it. Review when you’ve got a coffee in your hand or a train to catch.
- Over coffee~5 min
- On the commute~5 min
- Before bed~5 min
The whole point: the app gets out of the way so the reading gets in.
- lemonde.fr/article…URL
- il-gattopardo.epubEPUB
- memoria-2026.pdfPDF
- IMG_4022.heicphoto
Universal import
Built for the way you actually read.
Whatever you’re reading — a news article, a novel, the back of a cereal box — Lemnly turns it into vocabulary in under a minute.
- Four ways in, one workflowURL, EPUB, PDF, or photo. Same import preview, same review experience, same shared cache underneath.
- Smart lemmatisationEvery verb form, plural and declension collapses to its lemma so "running, runs, ran" is one card, not three.
- CEFR-aware filteringTell Lemnly your target level — say B2 — and it’ll skip anything well below it and flag the words above.
- Shared cache, cheap AIOnce a word has been labelled in your language, every future learner gets it for free. The cost curve goes down, not up.
- You stay in chargeReview every proposed card before it lands in your deck. Edit, drop, or batch-accept in two clicks.
Add words without leaving the page.
Drop in a source — a URL, a chapter, a photo of a page — and Lemnly opens the text in a reader. Tap a word for the translation. Tap "Add" and it lands in your deck, with the sentence you found it in. No tabs, no copy-paste, no broken flow.
- One tap, one translationTap any word for the gloss, the part of speech, and the example sentence pulled from the surrounding text.
- Known words fade backLemnly knows what’s already in your library. Familiar words dim into the background so your eye goes straight to the new ones.
- Same flow for every sourceWhether you started from a URL, a book, or a snapped page — the reader is identical underneath. You only learn one workflow.
Cuando el señor Bilbo Bolsón de Bolsón Cerrado anunció que muy pronto celebraría su centesimoprimer
Shared decks
You don’t have to start from scratch.
Someone has probably already done the groundwork you need — a frequency-ordered starter pack, the vocabulary from a specific novel, an exam-prep set. Subscribe to a public deck; its cards land in your library, scheduled by FSRS just like your own.
- Subscribed, not copiedWhen the deck author improves a card, your version updates automatically.
- Edit one card and it’s yoursThe moment you change anything, that card unlinks from the source. Your overrides never get synced over.
- Publish your ownMade a great deck from a book you love? Make it public with one click. Other learners discover it from the browse screen.
- Spanish A2 — frequency 2kA2by @lemnly · 1,948 cards · 412 subscribersacercamientrasapenasa través de
- German irregular verbsB1by @mariap · 187 cards · 96 subscribersempfehlenverschwindenerschreckengelingen
- English C1 — academic connectivesC1by @tobias_l · 320 cards · 38 subscribersnonethelessinsofar ascontingent onby virtue of
For context
Where Lemnly sits.
Not a Duolingo replacement, not an Anki replacement. A different slice of the same problem: turning what you read into vocabulary you keep.
| Feature | Lemnly | Anki | Duolingo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Import from any URL | |||
| Import EPUB / DOCX / text | |||
| Photo capture → cards | |||
| Voice input | |||
| FSRS scheduler | |||
| Forward + reverse review of one card | |||
| Public, subscribe-able decks | |||
| Shared vocab cache (cheap labelling) |
An honest note
Lemnly is brand new. There are no big testimonials yet.
I’m a German developer who relocated to Costa Rica and is now reading El Señor de los Anillos in Spanish. Lemnly exists because I needed a tool that didn’t quite exist: drop in the chapter, surface only the words I don’t know, study them, get back to the book. So I built it.
The product works and it’s being used every day — but you won’t find a wall of glowing quotes here, because the polite ones would be from people I know and the honest ones haven’t been collected yet. If you try it, please tell me what you think. Every reply gets read.
- Languages liveEnglish ↔ German, Spanish
- Sources supportedURL · EPUB · DOCX · TXT · photo · voice
- Study modesflashcard · type · listening · multi-choice · letters
- SchedulerFSRS, forward + reverse
- PricingFree in beta
FAQ
Questions, answered honestly.
The article you’d normally skim?
Paste it in tonight.
Free while in beta. Add your first source in under a minute and see the words you actually need.