oqou

Learn a language from anything you read

Education

Languages

Books

Hey everyone 👋 I built oqou because every language app I tried taught vocabulary the same way, isolated flashcards with no context. I'd grind through a streak, feel like I was making progress, and then completely freeze up the moment I tried to read something real. Words I supposedly "knew" didn't feel familiar at all once they showed up in an actual sentence. The problem I was actually trying to solve was that gap between studying a language and reading it. I wanted to read real books and articles in the language I was learning, not textbook dialogues, but every time I hit a word I didn't know, I had to break my flow, open a separate dictionary app, search, lose my place, and find my way back. By the third lookup on a page, I'd usually give up and go back to something already translated. So the core idea became: what if looking up a word never pulled you out of what you were reading at all? The first version was just that, import a text, tap a word, see its meaning right there on the page. But it evolved a lot from there. I added spaced repetition once I realized tapping a word and moving on wasn't enough, I needed the words I saved to actually come back to me at the right time instead of disappearing. Then I added read aloud with word level highlighting, because I noticed my reading comprehension was way ahead of my listening comprehension, and hearing a word while seeing it closed that gap fast. The generative covers were almost an accident, I got tired of my imported PDFs all looking the same in my library, so I built something that gives every text its own identity. The one thing that didn't change through any of it was keeping everything private and on device by default. No account needed to use the core app, nothing collected in the background. oqou now supports 12 languages, and the core experience, importing, tap to translate, saved words, spaced repetition review, and read aloud, is completely free. There's an optional Pro tier for unlimited imports and deeper AI explanations for people who want more. Would genuinely love feedback here, especially from anyone actively learning a language. Happy to answer anything about how it works, why I made certain calls, or what's coming next.