ToneBeyondLingua

Type or say what you want to say in Japanese. See it in English at the vocabulary level you choose — and see exactly what got lost on the way.

Say what you actually mean — at the level you can actually speak.

Type or speak what you want to say in your own language. Lingua puts it into English using only the most common words, and shows you the sentence broken into coloured pieces: who, does what, when and where. Then it translates its own English back into your language, so you can see how much of your meaning survived.

MOVE THE DIAL

One control changes everything. Drag it down and the English gets simpler; the back-translation gets thinner, and you can watch the nuance fall away. Drag it up and it comes back. That is the whole idea: not "you got it wrong", but "this is what you can say with the words you have — and this is what a few more words would buy you."

Each rung is a vocabulary ceiling by word frequency, from the 500 most common English words up to no limit at all, with CEFR bands shown as a rough guide. Lingua checks every word it produces against that ceiling, so when a word sits above the level you picked it says so, with a dashed outline, instead of quietly slipping it in.

A DICTIONARY YOU CAN REACH FOR

Missing a word? Pull up the toolbox. Look it up in your own language and see the options side by side with the level each one sits at — "hard" and "difficult" are not the same distance away as "challenging". Tap one and it drops straight into the sentence you are writing.

THEN SAY IT OUT LOUD

The sentence you just built carries through to the studio, where you shape its rhythm and stress and say it back in your own voice.

BUILT TO BE READABLE

Large text throughout, with its own size control on top of Dynamic Type. The colour coding is doubled with distinct shapes and icons, so it works without relying on colour vision. Twelve interface languages.

WHAT IT COSTS

Nothing. No ads, no subscription, no paywalled levels, no limit on how much you can translate. There is an optional tip jar if you want to support the work; it unlocks nothing, because everything is already unlocked.

Nothing you write or say is collected, and there is no tracking of any kind.

BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD

Rewriting a sentence to a chosen vocabulary level runs on Apple Intelligence, on your device. On a device or iOS version without Apple Intelligence, the word search, the level ladder and the pronunciation studio all still work, but automatic level-constrained rewriting will not be available.

Composition currently goes from your language into English.

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Word lists: New General Service List and New Academic Word List by Browne, C., Culligan, B. and Phillips, J., used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Japanese headwords from JMdict/EDICT, © Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, used under CC BY-SA.

Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any language testing organisation.