About Fluentessa

I'm a software engineer. My native language is Russian, I'm fluent in English and Portuguese, and right now I'm learning French.

When I discovered the inline annotation method — where translations are woven directly into the text — something clicked. For the first time, I could sit down with a real French book and actually read it. Not study it. Read it.

I combined this with the Pimsleur method for listening and speaking, and the two together accelerated my progress far beyond what either could do alone. Pimsleur gave me ears and a voice. Annotated reading gave me vocabulary, reading ability, and a feel for how French actually works on the page. About two months in, I started listening to the InnerFrench podcast and could already follow most of it — which felt wild for an intermediate-level podcast that early.

Honest caveat: I already speak Portuguese, which is closely related to French. Plenty of vocabulary and sentence structure carries over, so my pace probably won't match someone starting from English alone — your mileage will vary depending on what other languages you already know.

Why existing solutions weren't enough

Discovering how well that could work sent me looking for a tool to do it properly — and the bilingual-reading solutions I found all fell short in the same few ways.

Most parallel-text books line up the original and the translation at the paragraph level, or at best sentence by sentence. And they reuse an existing literary translation — written to read well in English, not to mirror the French — so it's often hard to see how the two languages actually connect. Take this line from Verne:

Original

De nombreux petits cours d'eau, la plupart affluents ou sous-affluents du Godavery, irriguaient cette contrée fertile.

A standard literary translation

This fertile territory is watered by numerous small rivers and limpid streams, mostly tributaries of the Godavery.

Beautiful English — but it rearranges the sentence and even adds detail that isn't there ("limpid streams" is nowhere in the French). Set beside the original, you can't tell which English answers to which French.

Reading apps usually take a different route: tap a word and a dictionary pops up. But that definition is out of context — it can't tell you which sense the word carries in this particular sentence, and it breaks down on idioms, where a word-for-word gloss means nothing.

It struck me that today's language models make something better possible: a translation prepared specifically to track the French, with each English phrase tied to the exact French it renders.

Fluentessa started as a personal tool. I wanted inline translations that keep me reading in French instead of jumping to English, with the help right there in the same sentence — not in a separate task. I use it for my own French reading every day.

So I built what I wanted to exist — and now it does.

How it's built

Fluentessa is really two things: the pipeline that prepares each book, and the reader you read it in.

Preparing a book is the heavy lifting. Several AI models work on it in turn — one writes a translation that tracks the French closely instead of reading like a polished English novel, another adds the short notes where a word, an idiom, or a turn of phrase needs one, and others check the result. And before any of that, the system reads the whole book once, so character names, recurring vocabulary, and the author's style stay consistent from the first page to the last, rather than being decided sentence by sentence. A full novel can run to thousands of these steps.

The reader is the other half — a web app with nothing to install. You read in your browser, on a laptop or your phone, with the original and its translation together on the page, and you can switch between a few layouts to keep more or less help in view as your French grows.

No automated system is flawless, so I'm continually refining how the books are made — and I welcome your feedback on anything that could read better.

What's next

Right now it's French with English annotations. Coming up:

• More languages — both other languages to read and other languages to read them in — but only once the French experience is as good as I can make it
• Native iOS and Android apps (the web reader works on phones today)
• Possibly, in time, the option to bring your own text into the reader — if enough people ask for it

Contact

Questions, feedback, requests? Email fluentessa.app@gmail.com or use the feedback form.