We are excited to announce a new way to read the Ginseng English Blog: a news app called Squid. Squid is a news “aggregator.” This means it brings together news articles from different sources around the internet, and puts them together in the same app. You might be able to guess why it's called Squid: the app's " tentacles help you gather all the best articles and navigate through the ocean of news."

You choose topics that interest you—for instance, Sport, Fashion, Food, Training, Psychology, Humor, Lifestyle, Film etc—and Squid makes something like a personal magazine for you. There is even a special section for English learners, called Easy English. This is where you can find posts from Ginseng!

In many ways, Squid is similar to other news aggregators like Flipboard and Pocket. It selects stories for you. You can save them for later on your reading list or share them to social media. For the polyglots out there, you can switch between languages in one click (language currently supported include English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German).

But there's one really cool feature that sets Squid apart as a tool for learning English: if you tap the Squid in the middle of the toolbar, you will reveal a set of tools for "marking up" the text. You can highlight new words or insert a text field to type in your definitions and translations. There are also some just-for-fun features like squid stickers and a doodling tool.

The app is still in its early stages, and a few of the tools need some updates to be fully useful, but it's a really cool app to check out early!

You can download Squid for iOS or Android.

More free English resources