Pratham Books- thousands of free children's books in many languages

[jeffers]

I have known about Pratham Books since they offered over 180 Hindi children's books to download for free during Covid times. I didn't realize that actually their books have open licenses, and are always free to download, you just have to use their Storyweaver website: https://storyweaver.org.in/en/

The top level filters show "trending languages", which shows about 10 different languages, but if you click on All Books, the language filter has hundreds of languages listed. Just to get a feel for quantity, I found there are 58 stories in Kurdish (Latin script) and 24 stories in Kurdish (Arabic script).

The books are given four levels, and using the Type filter you can choose readalong books, where there is audio for each page. Books can also be downloaded in pdf or epub format, and all you need is a free account.

I've only explored the Storyweaver website for a 15-20 minutes, but this looks like an awesome resource for beginning language learners, or people who just want some easy practice.

Screenshot 2024-05-02 134114.png

Moving up the levels, the stories are a bit longer, with more words per page, and the themes are a little more serious. Below is an example page from a level 4 book:

Screenshot 2024-05-02 135033 sm.png

[jeffers]

There is also a whole section for writing translations of their books. Many of the available translations were made by volunteers, so I guess the might be a question of quality. This can be done online or offline. The online version has the option of clicking on individual words for translation into your target language, which does make me suspicious of the potential lack of quality for some languages. However, if you find a translation you think is of good quality, you can view all of the books by that translator.

Translating a book or two might be a nice little project for some polyglot who wants to give something back!

Here's an image of the translation page:

Screenshot 2024-05-02 140313.png

[guyome]

Thanks, jeffers, it looks very interesting!

I reminds me of something similar for African languages I saw the other day: https://www.africanstorybook.org/#.

[stell]

Thanks for sharing Jeffers! What a great resource!