A reader for the languages
the big apps forgot.
Laesi takes Icelandic, Finnish, the Sámi languages, Welsh, Faroese, Old Norse, and Latin as seriously as Spanish, with real morphological lemmatizers for 60+ languages. The ones the big apps never bothered with.
Live demo: click any word
Take It With You
Download this whole Danish dictionary, every word, definition, lemma, grammar note and part of speech, plus any levels you set here, as a CSV that imports straight into Laesi.
About This Demo
This demo dictionary was built with Laesi's own capabilities. Definitions were looked up through Wiktionary and Google Translate and gaps were filled using its AI Features, while lemmas, grammar notes and parts of speech pre-populated by spaCy. The Laesi team then reviewed every entry, correcting and completing the definitions and grammar notes so they read well for a language learner. Each word's popup shows which reference answered.
Wiktionary definitions are used under
CC BY-SA 4.0.
The spaCy model da_core_news_sm, by
Explosion, is likewise
CC BY-SA 4.0 , trained on
UD Danish DDT v2.8
(Johannsen, Martínez Alonso, Plank) and
DaNE
(Hvingelby, Pauli, Barrett, Rosted, Lidegaard, Søgaard). The downloadable dictionary carries
the same notice.
This is the real reading view Laesi uses. I selected Den lille Havfrue as it was the first thing I read in Danish, but the same views, knowledge levels, and Anki queue work across all 60+ languages. Nothing you do here is tracked by us, but you can download your dictionary and import it directly into Laesi!
Built for the languages nobody else bothered with.
Laesi does Spanish and French perfectly well. But it's the only serious reader for sagas, for the Kalevala, for North Sámi, for an Old English charter. Start with the rare ones. The common ones come free.
The languages nobody else covers properly
Icelandic, Old Norse, Faroese, the Sámi languages, Kven, Welsh, Irish, Kalaallisut, Latin. Not an afterthought. The reason Laesi exists.
Real lemmatizers, not surface-form lookup
Voikko for Finnish, spaCy across the modern European languages, GiellaLT for the Sámi family, Faroese, Irish, and Old Norse. CLTK for Latin and BÍN for Icelandic are on the roadmap.
Pay once. Own it. No monthly creep.
A native desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. $99 one-time, with free updates for life. Runs locally. Your data is yours. No accounts, no cloud, no meter running in the background.
60+ languages, a dozen families.
From the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Here are a few we're proud of. Every mainstream European language is in there too.
Everything a serious reader needs.
No streaks. No XP. No cartoon owls. Just the tools that turn books into vocabulary you remember.
Knowledge-level highlighting
Seen → Recognized → Remembered → Known. The page visibly clears as you learn, and the model maps cleanly from other readers' levels.
Import books & subtitles
EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, DOCX, and TXT for books; SRT, VTT, ASS, and SSA for subtitles. Laesi tokenizes, lemmatizes, and highlights by what you already know.
Dictionary panel
Click a word while reading for Wiktionary or Google Translate definitions. Save only the senses relevant to the passage.
Multi-word lemmas
Select a phrasal verb or idiom with shift-click. Save it as a single entry with its own knowledge level.
Anki export
Queue words while reading. Export as tab-separated cards in L2→L1, L1→L2, and cloze formats.
Runs 100% locally
A native desktop app. Your vocabulary, texts, and progress live on your computer, never on a server we can turn off.
A browser extension that highlights any web page · an AI graded reader tuned to your vocabulary or a CEFR level · paste-back translate-and-annotate overlays · interlinear and facsimile readers · custom languages and conlangs · vocabulary import.
Four ways to read, and the tools around them.
Real screens from the app. Step through each one with the arrows, or click a shot to see it full size.
One price. Everything in.
A desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. No subscription, no cloud, no trial. 30-day refund if you don't love it.
One-time purchase · 30-day refund · No account required
Six kinds of readers.
The Nordic-phile
You're like me and studying languages from this small corner of the world. Be it sagas in the original or Nordic Noir. You already live in Anki and want a reader that keeps up.
The classics student
You're reading Latin, Old English, or Old Norse with a dozen tabs open: Whitaker's Words, Alpheios, Logeion, Perseus. You want all of it in one window, right next to the text.
The heritage learner
You're reclaiming the language of your family: Welsh, Irish, North Sámi, Kalaallisut, Southwestern Ojibwe. It's about culture and revitalization, and you want a tool that takes your language as seriously as you do.
The new arrival
You've moved to Helsinki, Reykjavík, or Tórshavn, and you need to read the real world around you, not B1 dialogues about ordering coffee.
The switcher
You've tried other reading apps and grown frustrated: the lag, the price creep, the UI getting worse every year. You want to own your tools and your data, and your existing knowledge levels import cleanly into Laesi.
The power user
You love the idea of LWT or Lute but wish someone would package it, add proper lemmatization, and stop making you tinker.
Common questions
Read what you actually want to read.
Sagas, eddas, Kalevala, Mabinogion, Beowulf, the Vulgate. You brought your own taste. We brought the tools.