Karak: Read and Learn Urdu is LIVE!
Assalamo alaikum!
Last year, some of you tried our beta with five stories and gave us a lot of helpful feedback. We're back with a much bigger library, a rebuilt reading experience, and apps for Android and the web. iOS is coming soon, Inshallah.
Karak is built to help you read, listen to, and speak more Urdu through stories and conversations. You can listen to native-speaker audio, follow along with the text, see sentence-by-sentence translations, tap words you don't know, save flashcards, and practice your pronunciation and speaking.
If you’ve already been on the revamped website, web app or the Android app, you may have seen the new version already. But here it is with some commentary
- Stories: Our jam. There is some really fun stuff, ranging from the super short (a 77-word story about a thief who meows) to the medium (a 1,100-word story about a long day in the life of a single mother sparrow) to the longest so far (our 5,500-word translation of a classic Chinese horror story).
- Scenarios: Short conversations, from quick hellos to a 750-word narrative following a bus ride through Karachi.
- Conversations: Native-speaker chats at native-speaker speed. A fun one: a mamoo tells his trembling nieces the story of the rooftop room haunted by a djinn). More to come and help you decode native speed (or those pesky TV trackers on GEO / ARY / Other that move too fast...).
We also have some new stuff to help:
- FLASHCARDS. Save the words you want to remember and review them whenever.
- New grammar dialogues in the ‘Learn’ tab to help you understand and practice specific tenses. These are real conversations that naturally use more of one tense than another. For example, two friends talking about their bad habits that may or may not still be in the past...
- New reading and speaking tools
- You want to take it sentence by sentence, and pause so you can absorb what you just heard? Use Pause to stop at each line or a paragraph, and restart whenever.
- You want to listen and repeat it at native speed? Use Listen & Repeat.
- You want to just nail your pronunciation of the perfect putdown in Bad habits or any other line? Use Loop and repeat it till you have it down pat.
- Upgraded website with a bunch of cool articles like an updated how to learn Urdu guide and how heritage speaker.
Overall
Everything in Karak is written, translated, illustrated, and recorded by native speakers.
We have content free to read, under ‘Try Karak Free’. All the longer stories have free chapters too, so you can get a taste of them.
If you’d like the full library and unlimited flashcards, we have monthly and annual plans, with founder pricing. See our plans and launch pricing.
Notes
We decided to include a beta dictionary in launch. Our dictionary is still growing, so not every word is covered yet. The entries we do have are human-reviewed, so they take some time to finish. Also, readers in Devanagari will find no dictionary at all (for now). Of course, you have Urdu stories with audio and translations for each sentence to tide you over and make sure you never, ever, get stuck.
Thank you & Try Karak
Thank you to everyone who tested the beta, sent feedback, or encouraged us while we built this. And thank you to the professors who gave us feedback and are planning to use Karak in their classes this semester, and the authors who trusted us with their work.
We hope you have fun with it!
Try it on web: Karak Web Or on Android
iOS coming soon Inshallah.
Honestly, there's a lot more to it all. Have fun reading! And let us know what you think or if you have any questions!
