How we make our stories

1. Choosing the books

We only work from texts that are in the public domain — old enough to be free of copyright. English classics come from Project Gutenberg. Korean classics and folktales come from 위키문헌 (Korean Wikisource) and 공유마당, the Korea Copyright Commission's public-domain archive.

When choosing what to add next, we favour the works people actually know and want to read — Pride and Prejudice before an obscure novel by the same author — and we follow what readers ask for. Every story names its source at the end.

2. Retelling at a level

Each story is a new, simplified retelling written for SeoJae Story, labelled with a level on the CEFR scale. The level sets how the story is written:

• A1 — short sentences, one idea each, the most common words, present and simple past.
• A2 — a little more connected; common time words, more past tense, everyday vocabulary.
• B1 — longer sentences with reasons and contrasts; less common words where the story needs them.
• B2 — close to natural prose, with the author's tone and some of their original phrasing.

3. Keeping the story whole

Simplifying the language should not mean losing the book. We keep the plot, the key scenes and the turns that make a classic worth reading. Long novels are split into parts you read in order from the book's page, rather than squeezed into one summary.

Many chapters also let you open the unabridged original of the same passage, split into short readings, so you can step from the retelling to the author's own words when you are ready.

4. Writing the translations

Every sentence has its own translation, aligned one-to-one so you can open just the line you are stuck on. Translations are written for the meaning the sentence has in that story, not word by word, and no modern, copyrighted translation is used anywhere.

We edit for natural Korean, not translationese. One example: English uses "he" and "she" constantly, but Korean rarely uses 그 and 그녀 that way. We went back through the whole library and rewrote those sentences with names, roles or no subject at all, the way a Korean writer would.

5. The tap-any-word dictionary

Tapping a word shows a short Korean gloss from a dictionary built in-house and stored in the app, so it works offline and nothing you tap is sent anywhere. It grows with every new story.

Before a story is published, an automated check replays every sentence through the exact lookup the reader uses. If any word — English or Korean — would come back without a meaning, the story does not ship until the dictionary is fixed. For Korean, the lookup folds endings and particles back to the dictionary form — 말했어요 to 말하다 — so it works for English speakers learning Korean too.

6. Vocabulary and comprehension checks

Each story picks out the words worth keeping, each with its part of speech, an example sentence and a translation. These become flashcards you can review with spaced repetition.

The comprehension questions ask about what happens and why, not trivia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and you can switch the questions into Korean (or into English, for stories written in Korean).

7. Audio

The Listen button plays sentence-by-sentence clips made with neural text-to-speech voices — a choice of voices for English, and a Korean voice for Korean stories. Clips are generated once, before release, and regenerated whenever a sentence changes, so the audio always matches the text. You can slow it to 0.5× or speed it up to 1.5×, and the current line is highlighted as it plays.