Reading Lord of the Rings in Spanish: my actual workflow with Lemnly

Eight months ago I moved from Berlin to San José. My Spanish was ten-year-old school Spanish: I could conjugate tener on a good day, I knew what cerveza meant, and I could mostly read a menu if it was printed clearly and the waiter was patient. Nothing that would survive an actual conversation about, say, why the water was off again.

The plan was the one that has worked for serious learners forever: read a lot, in the target language, every day, for a year. The problem was that the tools for doing it were all annoying. I’d tried Anki a few times. I’d tried pop-up dictionaries. None of it stuck. Eventually I built the thing I wished I had — and this is the workflow I’m actually running, right now, in Costa Rica, reading Tolkien in Spanish.

Why Lord of the Rings, in Spanish

Two reasons. One: I’ve read it three times in English over the last twenty years, so the story is in my head — every cognitive cycle I save not following the plot, I can spend on the language. Two: it’s long. About 1,200 pages across three volumes. That’s six to nine months of evening reading, which means I’m living with the same author, the same register, the same recurring vocabulary, long enough for any of it to stick.

The Spanish translation (Luis Domènech and Matilde Horne) is literary, faintly archaic, gorgeous. It’s also B2-difficult, which was a problem for me at month one. Solving that was step one.

The first month: borrowing a foundation

Opening volume one cold at A2 was a bad idea. I drowned in the first chapter, blamed myself, put the book down. Before going anywhere near Tolkien again I spent four weeks building a base.

Lemnly ships with a few seed decks — frequency-ordered starter packs per language. I subscribed to the Spanish A2 deck (about 2,000 lemmas), capped new cards at 25 a day, and did the daily review every morning over coffee.

Subscribing — versus copying — matters more than I expected. When the deck owner improves a card (better example, cleaner gloss), my version updates automatically. The moment I edit a card it unlinks and becomes mine, which is the right default. No accidental syncs over my fixes.

Four weeks in: 700-ish mature cards, mostly verbs and connectives, and I could read children’s books out loud to my partner without stopping every line. Not impressive on paper. Quietly enormous in practice.

Importing La comunidad del anillo

The EPUB import is the moment I’d describe as "the thing Lemnly is for." The flow:

1. Drop the EPUB into the import screen. The progress bar walks through tokenising and lemmatising — a few seconds for a single chapter, about a minute for the whole 480-page first volume.
2. The preview opens with the numbers. For the first chapter ("Una fiesta muy esperada"): 1,840 lemmas in the chapter, 1,520 already in my deck (or in Lemnly’s shared cache), 320 new.
3. I scrolled the proposed-cards list and unchecked anything that smelled like a one-off — a rare archaic verb form, a proper noun ("Bolsón Cerrado" doesn’t need to be a card — it’s Bag End). Ended up keeping about 180.
4. Committed. Cards landed in the deck with a 15-per-day drip so my reviews wouldn’t balloon the next morning.

Cost of all of that, in time: under two minutes per chapter. In money: roughly $0 — most of the new lemmas resolved from the shared cache because someone, somewhere, has already imported Tolkien in Spanish.

I import one chapter at a time, not the whole book. It keeps the drip manageable and it keeps me looking forward to the next import as a small ritual.

The daily rhythm

Mornings, on the patio with coffee, before the dog wants out: five minutes of review. Today’s queue is whatever FSRS thinks is at the edge of my recall. Some days that’s 12 cards, some days 30. I don’t look at the number, I just start.

I run in mixed direction — about half the cards come up forward (Spanish → English) and half come up reverse (English → Spanish). Reverse is harder and slower and worth every second. Recognition isn’t production; if I can only ever recognise the word, I can read but not speak it.

Between meetings I open the app for a typing round — same cards, but I have to type the Spanish answer instead of flipping. It catches all the words I "kind of" know and tells me I don’t. It’s humbling and it’s the single best driver of actual recall.

Reading happens whenever — the bus to work (twenty minutes), the queue at the bank (sometimes longer), in bed before sleep. I read at speed, mark words I don’t know with a highlight, and don’t stop. If a paragraph is opaque I move on and trust the surrounding pages to do the lifting.

Saturday: the import + capture session

Saturday morning I open Lemnly and process the week’s reading. Whatever I’ve highlighted in the EPUB gets imported. Whatever I’ve photographed (because Costa Rica is a country of signs, menus, and notices in places that are still on paper) goes through the photo capture flow — I tap the words I want to keep, the rest disappears.

I also use the voice input for words I hear but never see written: idioms from coworkers, the words my landlord uses for plumbing parts. I say the word into the bulk-add queue, Lemnly transcribes it, and I review the queue at the end of the week.

The book vocabulary is one stream. The street vocabulary is another. They feed the same deck. Tolkien teaches me sortilegio and arboleda; San José teaches me pulpería and casado and pura vida. Both go in.

Whole session: 30–45 minutes on a Saturday. Net result: 60–80 new cards going into the drip for the following week.

What’s working

• I’m past the wall. Volume one took me four months. Volume two is going to take maybe three. The third will probably take two. The friction drops as the recurring Tolkien vocabulary becomes mine.
• The dictionary panic is gone. I used to reach for the phone every page. Now I might reach once a chapter, mostly out of curiosity.
• Conversations have a floor. I still freeze, but the floor of what I can say has risen — I can describe yesterday, complain about the weather, ask for a specific recommendation. The verbs are there when I need them.
• I’m not burning out. Five minutes a day is genuinely five minutes. Skipping Sundays doesn’t bankrupt the deck. Eight months in, I’ve maintained the habit. That would have been unimaginable with Anki for me.

What still doesn’t work

• Listening lags reading badly. A Costa Rican TV news anchor is fine. A Costa Rican friend telling a story over loud reggaeton is not. Reading alone won’t fix this and I know it — I’m starting to add podcast vocabulary via voice input, but the comprehension itself needs conversation hours I haven’t paid yet.
• Subjunctive still trips me up. I recognise it instantly when I read it. I rarely produce it correctly in the moment. A grammar gap, not a vocabulary gap.
• Tolkien’s archaic register doesn’t help at the panadería. Knowing haya, hostigamiento and aciago is great for the book and useless when I’m ordering bread. The Costa Rican everyday register is a separate vocabulary I’m building in parallel.

What I’d tell past-me on the plane out of Berlin

1. Start with the public starter deck before any novel. Four weeks of frequency-ordered base vocabulary is the difference between drowning in chapter one and floating through it.
2. Pick a book you already know in your native language. Re-reading a translated favourite is the cheat code. You already know the plot, so all the cognitive load goes to language.
3. Import one chapter at a time. The cards you add today are the reviews you’ll do for the next two years. A 200-card chapter you actually want is worth ten times a 1,000-card volume you’ll regret on Wednesday.
4. Use mixed direction from day one. Recognition -only decks let you fool yourself. The reverse cards are where the speaking lives.

Where I am at month eight

About 3,400 active cards in Spanish-ES. Finished La comunidad del anillo, currently a few chapters into Las dos torres. The deck I subscribed to in month one still updates occasionally; I’ve added two of my own decks ("Tolkien — recurring," "Words I keep mishearing"). My partner and I now have a rule: at restaurants, I order. It works about 80% of the time.

The point of all this isn’t the numbers — it’s that the workflow is dead simple and the workflow is the product. Drop in the chapter. Study five minutes. Read twenty more. The software gets out of the way so the reading gets in.

That’s the whole thing.