Glossa vs LingQ
An honest comparison.
LingQ is a mature platform built around a large curated library of leveled content and native mobile apps. Glossa is for readers who want to bring their own books — PDFs, EPUBs, Project Gutenberg titles — and read them with CEFR-adaptive translation, on-demand audio, and built-in vocabulary practice. Choose LingQ if you want curated content and a phone app. Choose Glossa if you want to read what you already chose, on a desktop or tablet browser.
At a glance
| Glossa | LingQ | |
|---|---|---|
| Upload your own PDFs and EPUBs | Yes | No |
| Built-in content library | Project Gutenberg (public-domain) | Extensive curated library |
| Native mobile app | Web responsive only | iOS and Android |
| Click-to-translate | Yes | Yes |
| Audio narration | Native-voice TTS on any sentence | Recorded audio with library lessons |
| Spaced-repetition vocabulary | Yes | Yes |
| CEFR-adaptive interlinear translation | Yes (difficulty slider) | No |
| Languages supported | 18 | 40+ |
When to choose LingQ
LingQ is the right call if you want curated, level-appropriate mini-lessons, podcasts, and short articles with synchronized recorded audio — and you want them on your phone. LingQ has been around since 2007 and the library is large; the learner community is active. If you're learning a language Glossa doesn't yet support — Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Cantonese, and many smaller European languages all fall outside Glossa's 18 — LingQ likely covers it, and that alone may decide the question.
When to choose Glossa
Glossa is the right call if you have a specific book you want to read — a novel you've been putting off, a textbook, a news archive in PDF — and you want the translation tools built around that book rather than around someone else's curriculum. Glossa's interlinear translation responds to a CEFR difficulty slider, so the words that get glossed shift as your level improves. Audio narration runs on neural TTS, so any sentence in any book gets native-quality audio on demand — you're not constrained to library lessons that happen to have a voice recording.
Glossa is web-first; there is no native mobile app today. The responsive site works on phones, but if most of your reading happens on iOS or Android in a dedicated app, that is a real trade-off worth weighing.
Try Glossa
The free tier covers two books and 10 pages of reading — enough to confirm whether the upload-your-own-books workflow fits how you want to learn.