Graded readings library — free short texts at your level
Graded readings work because your brain acquires language best when you understand most of what you're reading — ideally around 95–98% of the words on the page. Beeblio's free library collects short texts in 22 languages, each one pinned to a frequency band so you can find material that matches where you actually are, not where you wish you were. Every text is tagged by how many of the most frequent words it uses, based on ranks from the wordfreq corpus.
Each reading comes with inline glosses for unfamiliar words and a few comprehension questions to help you check your understanding. Whether you're working through your first 300 high-frequency words in Japanese or pushing into the 3,000-word band in French, you can filter the library to find texts that stretch you just enough without losing you entirely.
All the texts in this library are free to read without an account. Create a free Beeblio account if you want to save your progress, track which words you know, or highlight vocabulary across readings.
By language
- Catalan — 0 readings
- Czech — 0 readings
- Danish — 0 readings
- Dutch — 0 readings
- English — 0 readings
- Filipino — 0 readings
- Finnish — 0 readings
- French — 0 readings
- German — 0 readings
- Greek — 0 readings
- Hungarian — 0 readings
- Indonesian — 0 readings
- Italian — 0 readings
- Norwegian — 0 readings
- Polish — 0 readings
- Portuguese — 0 readings
- Romanian — 0 readings
- Russian — 0 readings
- Spanish — 63 readings
- Swedish — 0 readings
- Turkish — 0 readings
- Ukrainian — 0 readings
Questions
How do I know which band to start with?
A good rule of thumb is to pick the highest band where you can still read comfortably — where you recognise most words and only occasionally need a gloss. If you find yourself tapping almost every other word for a definition, step down one band and build from there.
What languages are available in the graded readings library?
The library currently covers 22 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, and more. The range of bands available varies by language as the library grows.
How are the frequency bands different from traditional grading levels like A1 or B2?
Traditional levels like CEFR bundle together grammar, speaking, writing, and vocabulary, which can make them hard to act on when you're just reading. Beeblio's bands are purely about vocabulary frequency: a text in the 800-word band contains vocabulary drawn almost entirely from the 800 most common words in that language, so you always know exactly what you're up against.