Lexeme

About

I'm building Lexeme at lexeme.uk for a specific kind of learner: someone who wants to pick up Italian by reading real novels on their phone — not curated textbook chapters, not gamified drills, and not a browser tab floating over the page. Duolingo, Babbel, and Memrise are great at getting you to open the app every day, but they won't carry you through a 400-page ePub. Beelinguapp gives you parallel stories it chooses; LingQ wants you to live inside its import-and-track ecosystem (and its subscription). Readlang and Language Reactor excel in the browser and on Netflix — not with the Italian ePub you already own. General eReaders don't solve it either. Kindle and Apple Books will look up a word, but tap a conjugated form like andiamo and you often get noise, not andare. FBReader and Readest are built for everyone, with translation and AI features bolted on as extras — Readest even pushes full-book AI translation and chat. Anx Reader centers an AI assistant around the text. That's powerful, but it's the opposite of what I want mid-chapter: one tap, one gloss, back to the story — offline on a plane, no prompt box, no cloud round-trip. Lexeme is the calm, native reader I wished existed for that gap: open any Italian ePub, tap any word, stay on the page with an instant English meaning — lemmatized to the base form, Wiktionary cross-references resolved offline, audiobook read-along and a personal vocabulary list when you want them. Built for pleasure readers chasing fluency, not for people who want another study app.

• For novel readers, not drillers — unlike Duolingo, Babbel, or Memrise, Lexeme is where you actually read the book
• Your ePub, your library — unlike Beelinguapp or LingQ, no importing into someone else's catalog or paywall
• EPUB reader with native text rendering — single tap selects a word without leaving the page
• Italian → English tap-to-translate with lemmatization (e.g. andiamo → andare) — what Kindle and Apple Books miss on inflected forms
• Cross-reference resolution — form-of glosses also show the base word's meaning
• Offline-first FreeDict / Wiktionary dictionary with online fallback — no Readest/Anx-style cloud AI required
• Deliberately not an AI chat reader — one tap, one gloss, back to the story
• Audiobook read-along with in-reader mini-player and lock-screen controls
• Personal vocabulary list and reading themes (light, sepia, dark)
• Resume where you left off per book