Short answers. Each one links to the longer version where there is one.
Palimpsest is a free website for reading, watching and writing in a language you are learning. It keeps a model of which words you know and shades the ones you don't, so you can read news, Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos and song lyrics at your level and look up only the words you need.
It is for intermediate and advanced learners, roughly A2 to C1.
Russian is the most developed: it has an adaptive placement test, stress marks and word-family analysis, and no waiting at the start of a session.
Spanish, French and German have the full reading, media, dictionary and flashcard features but no placement test, and the first word of a session can take a few seconds to load.
Persian and Hungarian are early versions, available by invitation.
Palimpsest is built for learners from A2 (elementary) to C1 (advanced) on the CEFR scale. It is not a beginner's course: it assumes you can already read simple sentences and want real texts rather than textbook ones.
Yes, Palimpsest is free.
For Russian you can take a short adaptive placement test. For every language you also choose a CEFR level, and Palimpsest starts from the vocabulary typically known at that level.
From then on, everything you do refines it: words you read past without looking up, words you do look up, flashcards you remember or forget, lines of a video you heard. You can set any word's score yourself at any time.
News comes from the public feeds of major outlets in your target language, sorted by how hard each article is for you. Wikipedia articles are in your target language. YouTube videos are ones with captions in your language, played in the YouTube player with a clickable transcript beside it. Music comes from the current charts, with lyrics where available.
You can also paste any text or link of your own.
When you click a word you get two things: a definition in your target language, written on the spot by a language model using words you already know, and the word's English meanings from Wiktionary. You choose which one shows first in Settings, per language.
The popup also shows the word's grammatical form, its conjugation or declension table, and your own score for it.
Yes. You can upload an Anki deck (.apkg or .colpkg) and your review history comes with it; your Palimpsest scores are never changed by an upload. Cards that are due appear while you read, and you can review them inside Palimpsest or download new decks as .apkg files.
An optional add-on for the Anki desktop app keeps the two in sync.
Not yet. The website works in a phone browser, with a layout made for small screens for reading, the word popup, flashcard review and the media pages. Anki uploads are desktop-only.
The extension brings Palimpsest to the web pages and YouTube videos you already read and watch in Chrome: it colours the words by how well you know them, opens the same word popup and flashcards, and lets what you read count towards what you know. It currently supports Russian and is coming to the Chrome Web Store.
Palimpsest stores your account, your word scores and your activity so it can work for you. It does not sell your data or use it for advertising. The browser extension never sends the address or text of a page unless you press Save.
The Privacy Notice and the extension privacy page describe exactly what is kept and why.
Email help@palimpsest.tech. That is also the address for asking to see, correct or delete the data Palimpsest holds about you, including your whole account.
You tell me. Vote on the next features in a two-minute survey.
A palimpsest is a manuscript page that has been written on more than once, with earlier layers still showing through. Palimpsest builds new layers of a language on top of what you already know. About us →