Hey everyone,

Like many here, I rely heavily on reading and listening for immersion, but I’ve always been frustrated by the existing options. LingQ has gotten absurdly expensive ($15/month) for software that feels slow and cluttered, and most free alternatives lack a seamless reading/listening workflow.

So I decided to build Lumen, a native, lightweight, and completely free desktop app designed specifically for immersion learning.

What it does:

• Zero latency reading: Built with Tauri 2 and WebKit (<100MB footprint, no Electron bloat). Clean serif typography and minimal UI so you actually focus on reading.
• Instant lookup & SRS grading: Click any word or highlight a phrase to see contextual meanings and save them to your vocabulary list.
• Integrated YouTube & article importer: Search and watch YouTube videos directly inside the app, convert them into lessons, and read along with synchronized audio.
• 100% local-first audio & AI:
  • Ultra-fast offline TTS using Supertonic 3 (sub-millisecond natural audio for words/phrases).
  • Local ASR via Whisper / Qwen3-ASR for perfect audio/text alignment (with an audio resync button if drift occurs).
  • Offline grammar/translation support via quantized local LLMs (Qwen 3.5), or the option to plug in your own DeepSeek API key for dirt-cheap, highly nuanced context translation.
• Anki-friendly: Easy CSV export with your target word, meaning, and the exact sentence context.

Why free / open source?

Language tools should be accessible. The app runs locally on your machine, stores everything in a local SQLite database, and respects your privacy.

The code is open source, and pre-built binaries (macOS / Windows) are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/LivingTwice/lumen-releases

It’s still an active project that I use daily for my own Italian immersion, so I’d love to get your feedback, bug reports, or feature requests. Hope it helps some of you streamline your input routine!

Hi guys, I started using this method and I started almost three moths, I’m trying to learn English so maybe I’ll bad write this, don’t judge me jaja, so I have a doubts about how improving my listening, always I had problems with this, I took English class and remember that listening was my skill most lower and I watched the big bang theory ‘cause I watched before in Spanish and I’m capable to watching without subtitles and I think than understand perhaps 60% or 75% but I noticed that sometimes when I watched a different series or movies just still read subtitles and I lose the chapters or the scenes and when I try to watch something different I can’t understand a lot I just understand words that I recognize all my life or word that somebody can recognize if is beginner in English and speak Spanish.

And other thing, what next after I finished my Anki desk of 1k words? Still reading? Or I need to do myself my Anki desk?

Also I’m reading short stories with lingq, and using lute but I’m not big fan of reading so I try to read about 30 minutes sometimes almost one hour, I prefer watch series jaja I have a lot of free time now and I’m so happy to share my first post in English by reddit, don’t laugh me JAJAJ I think that I wrote like a child.