Download for iOSHow to use AI to make graded reading at your level
Finding reading material at your exact level is one of the hardest parts of learning a language. Too easy and you learn nothing new. Too hard and you give up after a paragraph. Here is a workflow to generate graded readers at your level, listen to them, and remember the new words.
What you need
Three tools. Claude co-work, which can generate much longer texts than a normal chat, to write the reading material at the level you ask for, ElevenReader for natural text to speech so you can listen while you read, and Stacks to turn the new words into flashcards and remember them with spaced repetition.
Step 1: Generate a graded reader with Claude co-work
Open Claude co-work and paste the prompt below. Co-work matters here rather than a normal chat, because it can produce the longer texts a full chapter needs without cutting off. Replace the bracketed parts with your story, your target language, and your level, and it writes a chapter at that level, with a story section, vocabulary grouped by type, and a plain summary.
Ask for the next chapter each time and it continues the story, so you build up a full graded reader over several sessions.
Create the next chapter of a graded reader summary for: STORY: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson LANGUAGE: German LEVEL: A1-A2 You decide the chapter number, title, and how much plot to cover per chapter. Pick a natural stopping point that gives roughly 15-20 minutes of reading. --- FORMAT: 1. HEADER Full story title and chapter heading, written in the target language. Include a subtitle stating the language and level. 2. STORY Divide into numbered parts, each with a short title (all in the target language). Write in short, clear sentences suited to the level. Include dialogue with attribution. Show character thoughts and reactions, not just actions. Plain text only, no bold, no bullet points. 3. VOCABULARY CARDS Headed in the target language. Group into: - Key story words from this chapter - Useful everyday words that appeared - Useful verbs - One short grammar focus that came up naturally in this chapter - Useful phrases and expressions, with translations 4. SUMMARY Plain prose retelling of the chapter in the target language. Slightly higher level than the story itself is fine. 5. END MARKER in the target language. Output as plain text with === lines as dividers. No markdown.
Step 2: Listen with ElevenReader
Paste the story section into ElevenReader and pick a voice in your target language. Read along while you listen. Hearing the words at natural speed trains your ear and your pronunciation at the same time, and it stops you inventing your own wrong pronunciation in your head.
Step 3: Turn the new words into flashcards
Every chapter comes with a vocabulary section. This is the part that helps you remember. Drop those words into Stacks, and its spaced repetition schedules each card right before you are likely to forget it, so the vocabulary from your reading stays with you.
Because the words come from a story you chose, they carry context, which makes them far easier to recall later than a random word list.
Read, listen, remember
Stacks turns the vocabulary from your graded readers into smart flashcards, with FSRS spaced repetition, romanization, and automatic translations for over 100 languages.