Five detailed stories from real adult life — interviews, travel, health and culture. Click any word — or highlight a phrase — for an instant translation in nine languages, save it to your flashcards, then test yourself with a comprehension quiz.
Every story is also available as a fast, printable text page with its vocabulary list and quiz — no app needed.
A2 reading is where English starts to feel like a language rather than a subject. These stories add the past continuous, the present perfect and both future forms, which means the plots can move between times — a character remembers something, plans something, reports what someone else said.
The vocabulary widens to cover the situations you actually meet: travel, health, work, appointments, shopping and small talk. Each story is built around one of those contexts, so the words arrive in the company they normally keep rather than as an alphabetical list.
The A2 set moves from transactions to situations that need explaining: a job interview, a doctor's appointment, a flight rearranged after a delay, a complaint about a damaged product, a negotiation about working from home. Each one puts you in a position where a single sentence is not enough. The grammar reflects that — the present perfect against the past simple, the past continuous for background, modals of obligation and advice, comparatives, and the two futures — and every story is built around one of those contrasts rather than a single form.
A2 is where reading twice stops being enough. Read the story, then read the grammar notes, then read the story again — the third pass is where the tense choices become visible. Add the four phrases from each story to whatever you use for vocabulary, as whole sentences rather than single words. One story every weekday for four weeks covers the set, and the discussion prompts at the end of each page are designed to be answered in writing in under five minutes.
Before reading, look at the title and predict what will happen — prediction primes your comprehension measurably. Read once for the plot, then reread and notice every verb form: ask yourself why the writer chose the past simple in one sentence and the present perfect in the next. That noticing habit is what moves you towards B1.
Around five to eight minutes for a first read, plus a few minutes for the vocabulary and quiz. If a story takes much longer than that, it is probably above your current level — drop back to A1 for a few weeks and return. Reading should feel comfortable, not like translation work.
No. Aim to follow the story and understand the main events. If you can answer the comprehension questions, the reading has done its job. Chasing full understanding of every clause is what makes learners abandon reading altogether.
Three to five short ones is a realistic and effective target. Consistency beats volume: five stories spread across a week produces far more learning than five read in one sitting, because spacing is what moves vocabulary into long-term memory.
Pair your reading with the A2 grammar lessons and the A2 vocabulary lists, or check you are reading at the right level with the free placement test.
