Ten short, illustrated stories from daily British life. Click any word — or highlight a phrase — for an instant translation in nine languages, save it to your flashcards, then prove what you have learnt with a quick quiz.
Every story is also available as a fast, printable text page with its vocabulary list and quiz — no app needed.
Graded readers work because they keep almost every word inside what you already know. These A1 stories are written with beginner grammar only — the present simple, the past simple, basic questions and everyday vocabulary — so you can read a whole story without stopping at every second word.
That matters more than it sounds. Reading at a level where you understand roughly ninety-eight per cent of the words is what lets you absorb grammar patterns without studying them: you meet the third-person -s a hundred times in context instead of memorising a rule about it.
Every A1 story is a single everyday situation you will genuinely meet: ordering in a café, buying a ticket, asking for directions, going to the chemist, meeting a neighbour. There is no continuing plot and no cast to remember, so you can read them in any order and stop whenever you like. The grammar is deliberately narrow — the present simple, the present continuous, the past simple, have got, there is and there are, can, imperatives and going to — because the point at A1 is to meet the same handful of structures many times rather than to meet many structures once.
Read one story a day, twice each: once straight through for the situation, once for the highlighted grammar. That is about eight minutes. Then write three sentences of your own using the story's target structure — about your own morning, your own street, your own shopping. Twenty stories at one a day is four weeks including rest days, and by the end you will have met the present simple several hundred times in context rather than in a table.
Read each story twice. The first time, read straight through without stopping, even if a few words are unclear — the goal is to follow the events. The second time, use the vocabulary list and the tap-to-translate feature for anything you missed, then take the short quiz. Ten minutes a day with one story beats an hour once a week.
Very little. The A1 stories use only beginner grammar and the most frequent few hundred English words. If you can introduce yourself and describe your daily routine, you can read them. Each one also carries a vocabulary list for the handful of words that might be new.
No — that turns reading into decoding and kills your momentum. Read through once for the story, and only then look up the words that stopped you understanding what happened. Most unknown words at this level become clear from context by the end of the paragraph.
Exercises teach you the rule; reading teaches you the pattern. Both matter, but reading is what turns conscious knowledge into automatic use, because you meet the same structure dozens of times in meaningful contexts rather than once in isolation.
Pair your reading with the A1 grammar lessons and the A1 vocabulary lists, or check you are reading at the right level with the free placement test.
