Show HN: ReadPlusOne – Spanish stories built around the words you're learning

ReadPlusOne, a Spanish language learning app that generates custom stories tuned to a user's current vocabulary, launched publicly on August 25, 2026, per a Show HN post by the app's creator.

The app works by generating short stories built around words a learner is actively studying, while keeping roughly 95% of surrounding vocabulary within what the user already knows — a method sometimes called comprehensible input. As readers encounter unfamiliar words, they click them to add them to a spaced repetition system (SRS), which then surfaces those words in future generated stories. Users start with a short onboarding quiz to estimate their proficiency level before generating stories.

The project was built by HN user brandonc7, who described it as a six-month build. The creator says they have used it personally most mornings for the last two months and found it effective for vocabulary growth. The stated motivation was dissatisfaction with existing graded readers, which the author notes can vary significantly in vocabulary difficulty even within the same level — a B1-labeled book, for instance, may use vocabulary that skews higher or lower than expected. Anki-style flashcards were also tried and abandoned in favor of this story-based approach.

Under the hood, the app uses natural language processing to manage word records. Nouns and adjectives are collapsed to their lemma — so libro and libros count as one entry — but verb conjugations are tracked individually by tense and mood, per the Show HN post. The SRS selects whichever forms are due and passes them into a generation prompt. A separate validator then checks the draft's vocabulary against the user's known words; if too much falls outside that set, the draft is rejected and the system retries.

The app currently supports Spanish only and is described as working best from the A2 level up. The creator notes that below A2 it becomes difficult to generate stories engaging enough to hold a reader's interest. An account is required to use the product. According to the Show HN post, the creator plans to add other languages once the Spanish system feels fully complete, though no timeline or specific languages were named.