Read your phone in the language you’re learning.

Set your phone to Chinese, French or whichever language you’re studying. When you hit a word you don’t know, tap it, and Cairn explains it right there, without leaving the app you were in.

Join the closed test See how it works
Tap mode on

Tap any underlined word

Dictionary, reading and audio work offline. Only the explanation asks the network.

Three seconds, no app switch.

  1. Arm it

    Tap Cairn in the shade, or put the tile in Quick Settings. It stays on until you turn it off.

  2. Tap the word

    A menu, the keyboard, a chat, a button. Cairn reads the text the screen is already drawing.

  3. Carry on

    Meaning, pronunciation, what the word is doing here, one line of grammar. Then you are back.

On a real phone.

Tap a word, or draw a loop around as much as you want. Everything you keep ends up in the app.

  • Android settings in Chinese with 通知 outlined by a tap, and a button offering to explain it.
  • A sound settings page mid-gesture, a hand-drawn loop closing around 铃声音量, with a button offering to explain it.
  • Cairn’s own home screen, showing the cairn of saved words and the words looked up recently.

A word is not a sentence.

Every word is doing one job in one place, and a dictionary cannot know which.

A translator says

entretien

maintenance

Cairn says

entretien

ɑ̃.tʁə.tjɛ̃

upkeep · maintenance · interview

Maintenance here. The same word is what you call a job interview, which is the sense you are far more likely to meet away from a phone.

Seven languages, fully offline.

Each pack downloads once. The size is what it costs you to fetch.

  • 学习 6.9 MB Chinese 中文
  • 24.4 MB Japanese
  • apprendre 13.6 MB French Français
  • lernen 15.1 MB German Deutsch
  • aprender 26.4 MB Spanish Español
  • imparare 25.5 MB Italian Italiano
  • aprender 13.3 MB Portuguese Português

Not yet Korean · Russian · Arabic · Hindi · Thai · Vietnamese · Indonesian · Turkish · Polish · Dutch · Swedish

Free forever, not free for now.

Only the AI explanation costs anything to run, so it is the one thing with a weekly limit. Everything else keeps working when you reach it.

See the plans
  • The offline dictionary
  • Pinyin, furigana and pronunciation
  • Spoken audio
  • Saved words, forever
  • Seven days of history
  • Sync across devices
  • On-device translation

AI explanations · 20 a week, 40 signed in

It reads your screen.

Cairn uses Android’s accessibility service to read text the screen is already drawing. That is a serious permission, so here are its limits.

It is in closed testing.

Cairn is not on the store yet. Google asks for a group of testers first, and the app you would install is the finished one, not a cut-down preview.

  1. 1 Join the testers group with the Google account your phone uses. Nothing is posted to it.
  2. 2 Open the test on Google Play and install Cairn as you would any other app.
  3. Leaving is one tap on the same page, at any time.

Put the phone back to work.

Free to start, no account needed, one permission to grant.

Join the closed test