MyOwnLingo
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One story for each level, told a short chapter at a time, by email each morning if you like. Each chapter brings in a few new words and keeps using the ones before, so the story grows with you.
How to read it
- Read at your level: you should know about eight words in ten. Pick the level where that's true.
- Look at the title and the set-up line first. They give you the scene.
- Read the whole chapter through without stopping to look things up. Just follow the story.
- Pause: what happened, and to whom? The questions help.
- Read it again with the help on: the words glossed, the English for each sentence, the notes.
- Keep going: the next chapter comes tomorrow.
Make a free account and the next chapter comes each morning, at your level and your pace.
The stories
Die schwarze Katze A1
The Black Cat
Lena has just moved to Marburg, an old university town in Germany, to study. On her first morning a black cat is waiting at her door with a scrap of paper in its mouth, and on the paper is a number. Every morning the cat comes back, and every morning the number is different.
20 chapters · complete
Das Versprechen unter der Linde A2
The Promise under the Linden Tree
Mira has a new part-time job in a small second-hand bookshop. In a box of old books she finds a photograph of two children under a big tree by a chapel in the woods, and on it a promise: next year, at the festival, meet me under this tree. Ilse, the old woman who runs the shop, says she has never seen them. Mira is sure she is not telling the truth.
20 chapters · complete
Der Laden gegenüber B1
The Shop Across the Street
Jule is twenty-four and runs a tiny Käsespätzle shop of her own in an old street in Stuttgart. Her cheese noodles are what everyone comes for, and the cheese comes by post from Alois, an old cheesemaker in a mountain village. This month the parcel doesn't come, Alois doesn't answer the phone, and a big, loud chain shop has just opened across the street with a queue round the corner and a young cook who seems to know far too much about Jule's cheese.
20 chapters · complete
Gasthof Haller B2
The Haller Inn
Nora has taken a job at the Gasthof Haller, an old inn by a hot spring in a small town in the Black Forest, but she is not really there to work: her company wants to buy the inn, and her boss has sent her to find out what it is worth. From her first night things start going wrong, one after another, and always when it matters most. Someone at the inn is not what they seem. Then again, neither is Nora.
20 chapters · complete
Die Stadt, in der die Uhr stehen blieb C1
The Town Where the Clock Stopped
For half a century the clock in the tower of Kaltenstein, a small snowbound town in the mountains, has stood at three, and the town lives on the story of why: on the night of the great snow, they say, it stopped by itself. Now the mayor has hired Ida, a clock repairer from the city, to make it go again, and nobody in town seems to want her to. On her first night, the bell of the stopped clock rings once.
20 chapters · complete