It began as a reader. It is becoming a set of tools.

Everything I tried made me choose something I did not want. A dictionary would hand me the wrong sense of a word, because it had no idea which sentence I was in — and the first sense listed is very often not the one on the page. A flashcard app knew nothing about the book in front of me, so the words I met and the words I studied were two unrelated lists. Graded readers solved the difficulty problem by giving me books written to be studied, which is not the same thing as books I wanted to finish.

The gap between them was the product. Not a better dictionary or a better flashcard app, but the thing that closes the distance between meeting a word and knowing it — without ever making you close the book.

Nothing may interrupt reading. That is the entire design brief, and almost every decision here falls out of it.

Tap a word and the answer appears beside the page rather than over it. It is explained as used in that sentence, not in general. It is saved without asking, because being asked is an interruption, and scheduled for review without you setting anything up. You never leave the book, and you never do bookkeeping.

Reading is where this started, and it is still the quickest way I know to meet a great deal of real language at your own pace. But it is one way in, not the only one. Kató Lomb, the Hungarian interpreter who learned many of her languages by reading, called a foreign language a castle to be besieged from all directions — and a reader, however good, comes at it from one side.

So Verbeto is becoming a set of tools, each getting you to real Portuguese from a different side. The Reader is open now. The others will open when they are as good as it is, and not before.

Books are read on your own device. The file is never converted, never re-hosted for anyone else, and never leaves your control — it is stored only so your library opens on your other devices.

Explanations are generated the moment you ask and reused afterwards, so the same word in the same sentence is never paid for twice. Words split correctly in Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Japanese alike, which sounds like a detail until you try to tap a word in a language that does not put spaces between them.

One person. That is the reason it is small, the reason it moves in a straight line, and the reason there is no support department — if something breaks you are writing to the person who broke it.

It also means the roadmap is unusually easy to influence. If something is missing that you need in order to read, say so. Most of what has been built recently exists because somebody asked for it.