Kees Van den End

Glossed material is the key to reading a foreign language without a dictionary from day one. In our case, that's interlinear word-for-word translated stories. Literal, so you learn the foreign words, but where their meaning is different, also idiomatic translation. Take for example, this Spanish idiom, translated to English:

llueve a cántaros

(It's) raining by pitchers

It is raining heavily

It's raining cats and dogs

Both start and end results are idiom, that is, ways of saying things that differ from the actual meaning of the words. That makes it hard to learn a language. But with our three line translation, anyone who can read English, can also read Spanish now, or German, or Russian, or Dutch, or any of the many languages we have on offer.

I started creating literal plus idiomatic translations in 2006 for Spanish and Russian to allow students to start reading in a foreign language with a beginner's vocabulary. In 2025 there are more than 100 books allowing you to read and learn in over 23 languages, with literal plus idiomatic word-for-word translations to English, Danish, Dutch, Spanish and Mandarin.

The result is that students learn new vocabulary much faster because they get more and more complex vocabulary from the start and with the meanings in context immediately available. Especially if reinforced with revisiting the low frequency words a bit more often, this combination has you reading a foreign language independently in no time.

My goal is to create as much interlinear word-for-word literal plus idiomatic text for as many languages as possible.