The method
Two old ideas, built properly for once.
Keyword mnemonics and spaced repetition have both been studied for fifty years. Neither is a secret. What is rare is software that does both at the same time and lets the two talk to each other.
Part one
Give the word an address.
A new word has nothing to attach to. The keyword method fixes that by borrowing something you already know: a word in your own language that sounds like the new one, and then a single image that forces the two meanings into the same scene.
The image has to be physical and slightly ridiculous. A sensible one does not survive the week. That is not a style choice, it is what the effect depends on.
- Concrete beats abstract. A castle, not an idea of shelter.
- One scene, not a story. If you have to remember the plot it is too long.
- Your own beats ours. Writing it is half the work being done.
queso
cheese
sounds like case
A briefcase clicks open and there is nothing inside but one enormous burning wedge of cheese. Masculine.
Gender, solved the same way
The article rides inside the picture.
Learning that a noun is feminine as a separate fact is twice the work and half the recall. So the gender is a property of the scene, applied the same way every time, in every language that has one.
One rule, never varied. After a fortnight you stop noticing you are doing it.
Part two
Then ask at the last useful moment.
Every card carries two numbers. Stability is how many days your memory of it lasts. Difficulty is how hard this particular item is for you, which is not the same as how hard it is in general.
From those two the scheduler works out the day recall falls to your target and puts the review there. Not on a ladder of fixed intervals, and not on a class timetable.
On the same body of reviews that is worth roughly a third fewer repetitions for the same retention. You feel it as the app leaving you alone about the words you already have.
Recall for one card, drawn from the scheduler's own formula. The review is placed where the line crosses ninety percent, not on a fixed ladder. Answer it well and the whole curve stretches; miss it and it steepens.
What that looks like over time
Seven good answers and a word is yours for years.
- 110m
- 25d
- 316d
- 453d
- 55.5mo
- 615mo
- 73.2y
Seven consecutive good answers on one card. A single miss anywhere resets the front of that ladder and leaves the rest of your collection alone, which is the part a class-wide review schedule cannot do.
Part three
And then get out of the way.
The point of the first two parts is to reach the third quickly. Reading is where a language stops being a subject.
- 1
The library reads your cards
Every story reports what share of its running words you already carry. That number is computed from your own collection, not from a level somebody assigned you.
- 2
Eighty percent is the line
Below it you are decoding. Above it you are reading, and the unknown words start being learned from context instead of from a card.
- 3
What you meet, you can keep
Tap a word in a story and it goes into the collection with its hook attached, scheduled like everything else.
Being straight about it
What this method does not do
It does not teach you to speak
Recognition and recall of vocabulary is a large part of a language and it is not the whole thing. You will still need conversation, and this app does not pretend to give you that.
It does not work without effort
The hook makes the first meeting stick. It does not remove the reviews. What it removes is the reviews you would have wasted on words that were never going to stay.
Hooks fade, and that is fine
A mature word stops needing its picture. The scaffolding falls away on its own and you are left with the word. If you find yourself still reaching for the hook after months, that word usually needs a better one.
The scheduler is fitted to people in general, not to you yet
The weights are the published defaults, which are a very good starting point. Fitting them to your own review history is on the roadmap and it needs a few thousand reviews from you before it would help.
Try it on ten words
The argument is easier to check than to read about.