NO. 001·The reader-first language appAndroid first · iOS soon

Read what you
love. Learn
as you go.

Open anything in the language you’re learning — a novel, an article, a PDF you’ve been meaning to finish — and read it. Really read it. Tap a word for a translation. Ask for an explanation when you want one. The book stays a book.

Get on Google PlaySee how it reads
●  Android closed beta open now  ·  iOS later this year
Long-press to translate
One book at a time
Madame Bovary15 / 312
— Chapitre Premier —

Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.

Ceux qui dormaient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva comme surpris dans son travail. Le Proviseur nous fit signe de nous rasseoir; puis, se tournant vers le maître d’études:

— Monsieur Roger, lui dit-il à demi-voix, voici un élève que je vous recommande, il entre en cinquième.

Aa
4 %
le nouveau
the new boy
ExplainSaveHear
01 / 07
The wager

You don’t study a language. You live in one.

Most apps build a fence between you and the page — drills, streaks, quizzes, badges. Nufa starts on the other side. The book first. Everything else, when you ask.

Most apps

Built like a game. Optimised for opens, not reading.

  • ·You earn points for opening the app.
  • ·Lessons are designed to be finished, not lived in.
  • ·A streak punishes the days you have a life.
  • ·Vocabulary arrives in lists, divorced from sentences.
  • ·The content is small, repeatable, forgettable.

Nufa

Built like a book. Optimised for the page you’re on.

  • ·You earn nothing. You just keep reading.
  • ·One book, opened anywhere, picked up where you left off.
  • ·No streaks. No reminders. No urgency at all.
  • ·Vocabulary surfaces from your own sentences.
  • ·The content is whatever you love enough to finish.
02 / 07
How it reads

The page is the product. Everything else waits to be asked.

Translation, explanation, vocabulary, grammar — they live underneath the page. Available at a tap. Invisible until then.

01Tap · Hold · Release

A long press
becomes a translation.

Touch a word, a sentence, a paragraph. A quiet card appears with the translation, the pronunciation, and three things you can do next.

Read past it. Save it. Ask for more. The card vanishes the moment your eye returns to the page.

Response budget · < 500ms for translation · < 3s for AI explanation · streaming, never spinners.
Notre-Dame de Parisp. 47
— Livre Premier —

Il y a aujourd’hui trois cent quarante-huit ans six mois et dix-neuf jours que les Parisiens s’éveillèrent au bruit de toutes les cloches sonnant à grande volée dans la triple enceinte de la Cité, de l’Université et de la Ville.

Ce n’est cependant pas un jour dont l’histoire ait gardé souvenir. Rien de notable dans l’événement qui mettait ainsi en branle, dès le matin, les cloches et les bourgeois de Paris.

Ce n’était ni un assaut de Picards ou de Bourguignons, ni une châsse menée en procession, ni une révolte d’écoliers dans la vigne de Laas, ni une entrée de notredit très-redouté seigneur monsieur le roi…

les cloches
the bells
Cloche · fem. noun. Bell. From Latin clocca (a Celtic loan). Same root as English clock and German Glocke.
02Ask for context

An explanation, when the sentence won’t yield.

Idioms, registers, references — the things a dictionary won’t tell you. Tap Explain and a calm note arrives: what the phrase means, how it works, how a speaker hears it.

The AI sees what you’re reading. It explains this sentence, in this book, at your level. Not the textbook one.

Infers context from the page you’re on. Never reads an isolated word.
L’Étrangerp. 1
— Première Partie —

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J’ai reçu un télégramme de l’asile : « Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. » Cela ne veut rien dire. Peut-être était-ce hier.

L’asile de vieillards est à Marengo, à quatre-vingts kilomètres d’Alger. Je prendrai l’autobus à deux heures et j’arriverai dans l’après-midi.

Cela ne veut rien dire.
That doesn’t mean anything.
Tone. Camus’s narrator dismisses the telegram’s formal phrase — “Sentiments distingués” — as hollow. The line introduces his detachment, the novel’s central register.
03Words that earned their place

Vocabulary that comes from your book.

Anything you save returns later, not as a flashcard divorced from context, but with the sentence you found it in. The author. The chapter. The page.

You’re not memorising a list. You’re remembering a page.

Review on demand. Spaced repetition optional. Export to Anki when you outgrow us.
Library · Saved74 entries

Tapped on page 47 — kept for you.

cloche — f.
bell
…s’éveillèrent au bruit de toutes les cloches sonnant à grande volée…
Hugo · Notre-Dame de Paris · p. 47
enceinte — f.
enclosure, walled district
…dans la triple enceinte de la Cité, de l’Université et de la Ville.
Today’s surfacing
flâner
to wander, to stroll without aim
From Madame Bovary, p. 218 — “…il aimait flâner sur les boulevards…”
03 / 07
Philosophy

A reading product earns its place by what it adds removes.
Notifications. Streaks. Hurry.

— Operating principle · v 1.0

Tenet 01

The page is sacred.

No banner. No badge. No nudge. Typography, margin and page tone are calibrated for hours — not minutes. The reader respects the book.

Tenet 02

Help is asked for, never offered.

Translation and AI never interrupt. They appear when you tap, vanish when you don’t. The default is silence.

Tenet 03

Your library is yours.

Bring your own EPUBs and PDFs. Everything works offline. Sync is optional. We don’t lock you in — we host you while you read.

04 / 07
Languages & books

Bring any book. In any language.

Drop an EPUB or PDF — your novel, your textbook, the article you saved last week. Translation and explanation work across dozens of languages. Or start from our curated public-domain shelf.

Any file. Any language.
A curated shelf
to begin.

The reader accepts any EPUB or PDF. Translation and AI explanation are language-agnostic. The eleven below are the ones we’ve hand-curated a free public-domain library for, so you can start tonight.

Frenchfrançais
Spanishespañol
GermanDeutsch
Italianitaliano
Portugueseportuguês
DutchNederlands
Japanese日本語
Korean한국어
Mandarin中文
Russianрусский
Arabicالعربية
FR · 1857
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
ES · 1605
Don Quijote
Miguel de Cervantes
IT · 1957
Il Gattopardo
G. Tomasi di Lampedusa
JP · 1948
人間失格
太宰 治
DE · 1929
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Alfred Döblin
RU · 1866
Преступление
и наказание
Ф. М. Достоевский
05 / 07
Quiet by default

What we didn’t build.

A short list of features other apps consider table stakes. We considered them, then chose otherwise.

The one we’re proudest of

No streaks. None.

The cost of a streak is paid every evening of your life. We won’t make a book feel like homework. Read three pages or three hundred. Skip a week. We will be exactly here when you come back.

Notifications

No pings.

A reading app should never compete for your attention. The only notification Nufa will ever send is one you set yourself.

Gamification

No badges. No XP.

Progress is reading the book. That’s the system. There is nothing to level up except your French.

Social

No feed.

Your reading is private. No leaderboard. No friends-of-friends. No share sheet you didn’t ask for.

Telemetry

No tracking of what you read.

Privacy matters. Your reading is yours, full stop.

06 / 07
Three tiers

Pay for the quota, not the theme.

Everything that matters — the reader, the page, the translations of words you tap — is on every plan. Premium gives you more of what costs us money: AI calls. Nothing else is held back.

Tier 01 · Free

Reader.

$0/ forever
The whole reader. Four reading environments. Generous to start.
  • ·Unlimited reading, any EPUB or PDF
  • ·Free downloadable catalogue of classics
  • ·10 translations & 10 explanations / day
  • ·Vocabulary, on-device, forever
  • ·Side-by-side translation view
Start reading
Most chosen
Tier 02 · Pro

Reader, without limits.

$5/ month
For the people working through a novel a month.
  • ·Everything in Reader
  • ·50 translations & 50 explanations / day
  • ·Page-level AI analysis (5/day)
  • ·Custom typography & margin controls
  • ·Sync across devices
Try free for 14 days
Tier 03 · Premium

Everything.

$10/ month
For translators, teachers and the genuinely bookish.
  • ·Everything in Pro
  • ·200 translations & 100 explanations / day
  • ·20 page-level analyses / day
  • ·Anki export · personal corpora
  • ·Two additional reading environments
Go premium
07 / 07
FAQ

Honest answers.

If you’ve read this far you probably have one of these.

No, and yes. Duolingo is a brilliant introduction. Nufa is what you reach for once you can read a paragraph and want, very badly, to finish a book. Different tools, different stages.
A tap on Google Translate gives you a word. A tap on Nufa gives you a word, the sentence around it, the idiom you didn’t recognise, the page you found it on, and a quiet way to save it for later — all without ever leaving the page.
No. That’s just the size of our curated public-domain shelf. The reader opens any EPUB or PDF in any language; translation and AI explanation handle dozens of languages out of the box. The eleven are the ones we’ve personally curated a free library for to get you started.
No. Vocabulary, highlights and book progress are stored on your device by default. If you enable sync, they’re encrypted at rest. We do not advertise to you and we do not share anything with third parties. The privacy policy is short and plain.
Nothing. Your EPUBs, PDFs, highlights and vocabulary are yours and they stay where they are. The free tier remains generous: you can keep reading, just with smaller AI quotas.
Yes. We build on Flutter, so iOS and Android ship together. The Android beta opens alongside iOS.
The reader and your library work fully offline. Translations and AI explanations are network-bound; we cache aggressively so a book you’ve read once is largely available on a plane.

Open a book
in another language.

Android closed beta is open. iOS arrives later this year.

Get on Google PlayRead the manifesto
Android · closed testing — iOS coming later this year