Contextia

Contextia turns whatever you're already reading — a news article, a URL, a PDF — into a language lesson, instead of asking you to drill vocabulary lists that have nothing to do with what you actually want to read.

How it works: paste in an article, drop in a URL (Contextia auto-extracts the text from news sites like BBC and The Guardian), or upload a PDF/DOCX. Highlight any word or sentence and an AI gives you an instant, in-context explanation — translation, IPA pronunciation, part of speech, and grammar breakdown for full sentences. Everything you look up is saved automatically, with duplicate detection so your vocab list doesn't fill up with repeats, and words you've already learned get highlighted right in the article text the next time you open it.

Saved words go into a spaced-repetition review queue — flip-card style, mark each one "known" or "still learning" and Contextia schedules the next review automatically. For daily reading material, an AI recommendation feed pulls same-day news from BBC/Guardian and filters it to your CEFR level so you're not stuck guessing what's readable. There's also an immersion mode: instead of jumping straight into a wall of unfamiliar text, it gradually swaps words in a native-language article for your target language, increasing the ratio as your vocabulary grows.

Contextia supports 12 languages (English, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Thai, and Chinese), with the interface language and the language you're learning set independently. Choose your own AI provider — OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or DeepSeek — with your API key encrypted at rest, or start immediately on free trial credits with no key required. Multi-user accounts are supported for sharing a single deployment with friends, each with fully separate data.