What writing system does Lithuanian use?

Latin alphabet of 32 letters, nine with diacritics: the ogonek (ą, ę, į, ų), the caron (č, š, ž), a dot (ė) and a macron (ū)

Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?

Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.

Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?

Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.

Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?

Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.

Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?

Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.

How does word lookup work while reading?

Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.

Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?

Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

Do stories include audio or narration?

Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

Read Lithuanian with AI-Generated Stories

Try a free beginner story with helpful inline translations.

Try a free A1 story in Lithuanian, generated live, with tap-to-translate words and line-by-line translations.

Ona oro uoste

Šiandien yra graži diena.

Today is a beautiful day.

Ona yra Vilniaus oro uoste.

Ona is at Vilnius airport.

Ona turi didelį krepšį.

Ona has a big bag.

Ji mato daug žmonių.

She sees many people.

Ona žiūri į ekraną.

Ona looks at the screen.

Skrydis vėluoja.

The flight is delayed.

Ona liūdi.

Ona is sad.

Ona eina į kavinę.

Ona goes to a cafe.

Ji mato stalą.

She sees a table.

Ona sėdasi prie stalo.

Ona sits down at the table.

Ona geria karštą kavą.

Ona drinks hot coffee.

Kava yra labai skani.

The coffee is very tasty.

Ona valgo saldų šakotį.

Ona eats sweet šakotis.

Šakotis džiugina Oną.

The šakotis gladdens Ona.

Mažas trupinys krenta ant žemės.

A small crumb falls on the ground.

Ona juokiasi.

Ona laughs.

Ona ilgai laukia.

Ona waits for a long time.

Laikas eina lėtai.

Time moves slowly.

Ona klauso muzikos ir laukia.

Ona listens to music and waits.

Staiga žmonės atsistoja.

Suddenly people stand up.

Skelbimas praneša naujieną.

An announcement gives the news.

Baltas lėktuvas atskrenda.

A white airplane arrives.

Ona greitai atsistoja.

Ona stands up quickly.

Ona ima savo krepšį.

Ona takes her bag.

Ona šypsosi.

Ona smiles.

Ona eina į lėktuvą.

Ona goes to the airplane.

Quick facts about Lithuanian

Speakers

About 2.8 million people speak Lithuanian as a first language in Lithuania; estimates of the worldwide total range from about 3.2 million to 4 million (as cited by Wikipedia).¹

Did you know?

Lithuanian keeps grammatical and sound features of Proto-Indo-European that other languages lost, which makes it an important source for reconstructing that ancestor language.¹

The main challenge

Stress is free and can fall on any syllable, and in many nouns it moves between the stem and the ending across the forms (four accent classes); long stressed syllables also carry an acute or circumflex pitch accent.²

Sources

About the Lithuanian language

Language family	Indo-European → Balto-Slavic → Baltic (East Baltic)¹
Speakers	About 2.8 million native speakers in Lithuania. Estimates of the worldwide total range from about 3.2 million to 4 million (the latter a 2022 figure). Around half a million residents of Lithuania of other backgrounds speak it daily as a second language.¹
Primary script	Latin alphabet of 32 letters, nine with diacritics: the ogonek (ą, ę, į, ų), the caron (č, š, ž), a dot (ė) and a macron (ū)²
Word order & typology	Highly inflected and conservative, with seven cases; nouns have two genders, while adjectives and pronouns keep a neuter. Case endings mark subject and object, so word order is flexible, with SVO as the neutral order.³^,4
Official status	Official language of Lithuania and an official language of the European Union since 2004; a recognised minority language in Poland and Belarus.¹^,5

Lithuanian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR & NŠA state language categories)

Stichos level	Approximate framework equivalent	Reader profile
A0	Pre-A1	Early Beginner
A1	CEFR A1 (basic)	Beginner
A2	CEFR A2 (Category I)	Elementary
B1	CEFR B1 (Category II)	Intermediate
B2	CEFR B2 (Category III)	Upper Intermediate

The National Education Agency (NŠA) runs Lithuania’s state language exams. One exam covers the basic category and Category I (A1–A2); Category II is B1 and Category III is B2. NŠA also offers a C1 exam outside the category system. This column is a reading guide, not an exam result.

Reference corpora

Most corpus work on Lithuanian comes from Vytautas Magnus University (VDU) in Kaunas.¹

Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language: The Dabartinės lietuvių kalbos tekstynas, compiled since 1990, holds about 208 million morphologically annotated tokens, mostly from the press, with fiction, non-fiction, administrative documents and spoken language making up the rest.¹
Pedagogic Corpus of Lithuanian: Kovalevskaitė and Rimkutė (2020) describe a 669,000-token corpus for teaching Lithuanian as a foreign language: about 111,000 tokens for A1–A2 and 558,000 for B1–B2; the 2022 release puts the spoken share at about 7.5%.²^,3
Register: Stichos writes Standard Lithuanian (bendrinė kalba) at every level and leaves out dialect forms, regionalisms and colloquialisms.

Readability design principles

Lithuanian text difficulty has mainly been studied by classifying texts against CEFR levels rather than with a single formula.¹

Level classification: Grigonytė, Kovalevskaitė and Rimkutė (Baltic HLT 2018) trained classifiers on levelled coursebook texts, using readability-style surface features and shallow linguistic features, to label other texts A1 to B2. Logistic regression performed best.¹
Stress and pitch accent: Stress is free: it can fall on any syllable, and in many words it moves between stem and ending. A long stressed syllable also carries one of two pitch accents, acute or circumflex. Accent marks are generally used only in dictionaries and where needed for clarity, so ordinary text does not show stress.²^,3
Stichos: Stichos grades its readers with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length caps. At A0 that means single main clauses of essential present-tense verbs, with no conjunctions and no participles.

Script & grammar scaffolding

Tenses: A0 uses only the present (esamasis laikas). A1 adds the simple past (būtasis kartinis laikas); the future (būsimasis laikas) and the imperative mood (liepiamoji nuosaka) follow at A2, although A1 already allows five informal commands such as žiūrėk and palauk. The past frequentative (būtasis dažninis laikas, “used to”) and the conditional (tariamoji nuosaka) arrive at B1.
Participles: Participles are excluded at A0 and A1, and complex participial forms through A2. B1 allows basic active participles used as adjectives, and B2 adds the adverbial forms padalyviai and pusdalyviai with simple passive constructions.
The reflexive -si-: The reflexive particle goes at the end of a simple verb (mokosi) but moves between prefix and root when the verb has a prefix (pasimoko).
Pronouns and address: Subject pronouns are dropped when the verb ending makes the subject clear. Speakers use tu with friends, children and family and Jūs with strangers and elders.

Related academic & framework resources

Lietuvių kalbos mokėjimo lygiai (kategorijos) – NŠA: The National Education Agency’s list of state language exams, from the combined basic/Category I exam (A1–A2) to Category III (B2) and a C1 exam.
Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language: The CLARIN-LT record for the 208-million-token VDU corpus, by Utka, Rimkutė, Kovalevskaitė and colleagues.
Pedagogic Corpus of Lithuanian: The CLARIN-LT record for the 669,000-token learner-oriented corpus (2022 release), by Rimkutė, Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė, Kovalevskaitė and colleagues.
Pedagogic Corpus of Lithuanian: A New Resource for Learning and Teaching Lithuanian as a Foreign Language: Kovalevskaitė and Rimkutė’s article in Sustainable Multilingualism, volume 17 (2020).
Linguistically-Motivated Automatic Classification of Lithuanian Texts for Didactic Purposes: The Baltic HLT 2018 paper by Grigonytė, Kovalevskaitė and Rimkutė.
Lithuanian accentuation (Wikipedia): An overview of Lithuanian free stress, its mobile stress patterns and the acute and circumflex pitch accents.
Lithuanian orthography (Wikipedia): An overview of Lithuanian spelling, including the accent marks used in dictionaries.

Frequently asked questions

What writing system does Lithuanian use?: Latin alphabet of 32 letters, nine with diacritics: the ogonek (ą, ę, į, ų), the caron (č, š, ž), a dot (ė) and a macron (ū)
Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?: Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.
Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?: Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.
Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?: Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.
Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?: Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.
How does word lookup work while reading?: Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.
Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?: Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.
Do stories include audio or narration?: Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

Teaching Lithuanian? See the tutor page →

Free Sample Readers · Stichos