Sluka is a reader for the open web. It highlights the words you haven't learned yet on any page, in a book, under a video or in a chat window, and remembers what you know from one site to the next. Nothing leaves your machine.
One payment. No subscription, no account, no server to depend on.
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Listening counts too
Reading is half the input. Sluka also counts time spent listening to the language you are learning — and only that language. Time is credited against the track's own clock rather than the wall clock, so a paused tab, a stalled player or a sleeping laptop earns nothing, and a podcast at 1.5× credits the time you actually spent.
How it works
There is no review session and no test. You read something you wanted to read anyway, and the words sort themselves out as you go.
Sluka reads the HTML, so highlights stay glued to the words when you scroll, resize or zoom. No OCR, no screenshots, no copying text into a separate app.
Hovering shows the reading and the meaning. 1–4 sets how well you know it, K marks it known and the highlight disappears, X ignores names and numbers forever. No clicking, no popup to dismiss.
A word you learned in a news article is already known in the next book, the next video and the next forum thread. Your vocabulary is one list, not one list per site.
Words read are credited for text that was actually on screen long enough to have been read, capped by the time you really spent there. Scrolling an article to the bottom in two seconds credits two seconds. Both halves have to agree, which is what keeps the number worth looking at.
Words, books and statistics live in your own browser. There is no account to make and no server holding your data. Back it up to a file whenever you like, and carry it to another computer.
The method
Sluka is not a neutral tool. It is built around one way of learning a language, and it is bad at every other way on purpose.
“Listening and reading are so powerful.” Steve Kaufmann — polyglot in some twenty languages, co-founder of LingQ, who began Russian at sixty
Kaufmann's argument is that a language is absorbed rather than studied. You take in a very large amount of real content you actually find interesting, you meet the same words again and again in contexts that differ slightly each time, and your brain extracts the patterns without being told the rules. Grammar arrives as a feeling for what sounds right, long before it arrives as a table. He names three things that decide whether it works: attitude, time spent with the language, and the ability to notice what the language is doing.
The web is the library. Read the articles, forums and fiction you would have read anyway — Sluka works on whatever is in front of you rather than on a walled catalogue of graded texts.
No flashcards, no spaced repetition, no review queue that grows while you sleep. A word is learned by meeting it in twenty sentences, not by being tested on it in isolation.
You do not have to understand every word to make progress, and Sluka never blocks the page until you do. Words you skip stay lit and come back around.
Time under video captions and time in an audio player are tracked alongside words read, because half of the input is the half you hear.
The number that matters is how many words you know and how much you have got through. There are no badges, no confetti and nothing that punishes you for a quiet week.
If you have used LingQ, the model will be familiar — that is deliberate, and Sluka can import your exported words. The differences are that this runs on the whole open web instead of inside a content library, that your data stays on your machine, and that you pay once.
Where it works
Articles, forums, fiction, documentation. Any page in the language you are studying, including pages set vertically (直排).
PDF, EPUB and plain text, read inside the app with the same highlighting and the same word list. Scanned PDFs are the exception — there is no OCR, deliberately.
Captions on YouTube, Netflix and other players are highlighted like anything else, with an autopause that waits for you before the line disappears.
Conversations with an assistant in your target language are read as they stream in, which makes a chatbot a source of endless graded input.
An Android app with the same reader and the same shelf. Your words sync directly between your computer and your phone over your own network — not through anyone's server.
One at a time, so the shelf and the statistics always belong to the language you are actually in. Chinese counts as one language in both scripts.
Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese and Italian ship with their own bundled dictionary. Chinese reads traditional and simplified alike; Cantonese is its own language here, with jyutping rather than pinyin. The rest are read and tracked.
Price
There is no subscription and there never will be. Renting a reading tool forever is the thing this was built to get away from.
Every feature, every language, every device you own.
Paid through Polar, who handle the card and the tax. Your licence appears on screen the moment the payment clears, and arrives by email as well.
Free to try
Nothing is time-limited and no feature is switched off. The free version stops letting you save new words once you are tracking a thousand of them — everything already saved keeps working, and so does every language, every book and every page. You build a real vocabulary first and decide afterwards whether the tool earned fifteen dollars.
Get it
The same licence works on all of them. Buy once, paste the key wherever you read.
Sluka is not in any of the three stores yet. If you would like to know when it lands, write to help@sluka.app.
Refunds
If you hit a problem with Sluka that cannot be resolved, and you can show it to me, you get a full refund.
Showing it to me means enough for me to see the fault: the page or book you were reading, what you expected, what happened instead. A screenshot or a short screen recording is usually plenty. I would much rather fix the problem than take the refund — so write first, and if it turns out to be unfixable, the money goes back.
Write to help@sluka.app with your licence key. Refunds are issued through Polar to the card you paid with.
Lost your key? Have it emailed again — it is derived from your purchase, so it can always be reissued.