Choosing your study language

Set the language you are studying so definitions, vocabulary tracking, and story processing work correctly.

What is the study language?

The study language is the language your stories are written in — the one you are learning. It tells Valo Reader which dictionary to use for definitions, how to split text into individual words, and how to track your vocabulary progress.

This is separate from your interface language. If you are studying Japanese but prefer the app in English, set the study language to Japanese and the interface language to English. The two don't affect each other. See Settings → Language to change either one.

How to set it

  1. Open Settings → Language from the main navigation.
  2. Pick the language you are learning — the language of the story text, not your native language.

That's it. The setting applies to all new stories you import.

Why it matters

The study language controls three things:

  • Definitions — Tapping a word opens its details, including readings and definitions for your study language when available. If the language is wrong, you will see irrelevant or missing definitions.
  • Word tracking — Your vocabulary familiarity (new, learning, familiar, known, mastered) is tracked per language. Setting the right language means your progress accumulates correctly as you read.
  • Story processing — When you import a story, Valo Reader splits the text into individual words so you can tap them for definitions and track what you know. Different languages need different approaches to do this well — for example, Japanese text does not have spaces between words, so the system needs extra help figuring out where one word ends and the next begins.

If you set the wrong language, definitions may look nonsensical, words may be split at odd boundaries, and your vocabulary stats won't reflect what you actually know. See Troubleshooting imports for a full import checklist.

What happens when you change it

Changing your study language affects newly imported stories. Stories you have already imported keep their existing word splits and definitions — you would need to reimport them to process them under a different language.

Your vocabulary data is preserved per language. If you switch from Japanese to Spanish and back again, your Japanese vocabulary is exactly where you left it. You can study multiple languages without them interfering with each other.

Supported languages

The language list shows languages with tokenizer and dictionary support. Dictionary coverage depth varies per language. If your target language is not listed, you can still import and read stories, but word-level features like definitions and vocabulary tracking may be limited.