The story

Not so long ago, learning a language meant entering another mind. You learned Italian to read Dante, French to hear Proust in his own rhythm, German to meet Goethe without a translator in the room.

Somehow that idea shrank. Language learning became a hobby, then a streak, then a way to ask for the train station or order coffee with perfect efficiency.

I didn't want simpler content. I wanted real culture, made readable.

I wanted something else. I wanted to learn a language by getting closer to art, literature, philosophy, and film—but material like that, in a form a learner could actually read, was strangely hard to find. At the beginner level, what you mostly got was practical dialogues, travel phrases, and flat little texts that taught the language without opening any door into culture.

Any Text is my attempt to make that door real: Van Gogh's restless sky in The Starry Night, Kandinsky leaving objects behind altogether, Proust catching lost time in an ordinary sensation, Tarkovsky stretching cinema until it feels like prayer, Spinoza calmly identifying God with nature, all rewritten across six CEFR levels so they stay readable from A1 to fluent.

Nothing in the app is there because an algorithm thought it might perform well. The selection comes from years of my own reading and watching, mixed with museums, film history, and the literary tradition; if I don't genuinely care about something, it doesn't go in. I even use the heart button myself while reading: the films I save become a small watchlist I actually return to, and the books become my own reading list. That's also why each piece has a short note in Editorial on why it matters.

The mechanic itself is simple: tap a word, see what it means, and keep reading.

I built this for myself first, because I wanted this exact thing and couldn't find it. It's been my dream app for a long time, and if any part of this speaks to you, I'd be very glad for you to try it too.