When you're learning Lithuanian, sooner or later you hit the same wall: textbook texts feel too artificial, and real news feels too hard. You open delfi.lt or 15min.lt, click the first article — and drown in participles, long sentences, and vocabulary that no A2-level textbook covers.

I want to tell you about a resource that fills exactly this gap: LRT Paprastai.

What It Is

LRT Paprastai is a section of Lithuania's national broadcaster (LRT) where real news is retold in simple Lithuanian. The word paprastai literally means "simply."

The project was originally created as an accessibility service: for people with cognitive disabilities, the elderly, and anyone who struggles with standard news. But one of its main audiences turned out to be people learning Lithuanian as a foreign language. And it makes sense: where else are you going to find real A1–A2 level Lithuanian texts written by native speakers rather than a textbook?

Why It's Valuable for Lithuanian Learners

  • It's real language, not textbook language. The same topics Lithuanians read — politics, society, sports, culture — but without the convoluted constructions.
  • Vocabulary repeats. Week after week the news circles around the same words: vyriausybė, sprendimas, žmonės, savaitė, šalis. After a month of reading, you'll recognize them automatically.
  • Short sentences. This is rare in Lithuanian media — Lithuanian journalistic style usually loves long periods stuffed with participial phrases. Not here.
  • Free, no registration. Just open the site and read.

How to Use It Alongside Šaunuolė

Šaunuolė gives you grammar and vocabulary — everything you need to understand the structure of the language. But language doesn't live in exercises; it lives in real texts. So my advice:

  1. Read one news article on LRT Paprastai every day. One. Not five. One, but carefully.
  2. Write down 3–5 new words and check them in our cheatsheet or in Šaunuolė — what forms they have, what part of speech they belong to.
  3. The next day, reread yesterday's article. You'll be surprised how much easier it reads the second time.

This won't take more than 10 minutes a day, but after a month you'll notice how your reading has changed.

Where Else to Find Them

LRT Paprastai has mobile apps for iOS and Android, an RSS feed, and its own radio programs. So you can not only read simple Lithuanian — you can listen to it as well, which is especially useful for building listening skills.

Šaunuolė + LRT Paprastai = trainer + living language. It's the combination I really wished I had when I was starting out.