Make it yours
Sixty four settings, in nine groups.
The people who stay with a language app for two years are the people who bent it into the shape of their own habit. Every one of these exists because leaving it fixed would be choosing for them.
The nine groups
What you can change
Sessions
New words a day, the ceiling on reviews, session length, the order new words arrive in, where they sit in a session, and what hour your day rolls over so a session at one in the morning still counts as yesterday.
Scheduling
Target recall, whether the model is fitted to you, load smoothing, learning and relearning steps, the longest gap, and what happens to a word you keep forgetting. Each one says what it costs.
Exercises
Which of the abilities you want tested, how typed answers are marked, whether a non-Latin script is typed or built from tiles, how many options a question offers, and whether being right moves you on at once.
Mnemonics
Whether the picture is drawn, whether the hook appears before you answer, which hook wins when there are several, and whether the gender weather cue is used.
Sound
What plays automatically, how fast, and which of your device voices to use for each language.
Reading
How glossing works, whether tapped words join your collection, and how much of a story you need to know before it opens.
Appearance
Theme, accent colour, text size, spacing, typeface including wider letter spacing, animation, which screens appear in the bar and in what order, and which one the app opens on.
Accessibility
Higher contrast, underlined links, larger tap targets, extra announcements for a screen reader, and every keyboard shortcut shown rather than hidden.
Data and privacy
Whether the tutor is used at all, whether hooks you write are visible to anybody else, who can see your progress, how long your review history is kept, and email, which is off.
Three rules the table follows
And two things it deliberately cannot do.
Every default is the one that suits somebody who has never opened this screen. A setting whose default is wrong is a setting that punishes the majority for the convenience of the minority who will find it.
Anything that plausibly differs between languages is stored per language, because somebody learning Japanese and Spanish at once wants a reading line in one and not the other, and a different daily load for the harder of the two.
- There is no setting that hides how much you have forgotten
- There is no setting that inflates or repairs a streak, and no way to buy a missed day back
- There is no setting that turns off the label saying a sentence came from a model
- Every group can be put back to how it ships, on its own, without touching the rest
- A preference that is not declared on the server cannot be stored, which is what stops two screens disagreeing about what a setting means
Reasonable questions about a long settings screen
Is this not overwhelming?
It would be if you had to visit it. You do not: the defaults are a complete, coherent product, and most people will never open the screen. It is there for the person two years in who wants their sessions forty cards long and their target recall at eighty five per cent.
Why is the daily goal in answers rather than minutes?
Because minutes reward leaving the tab open, and they punish the person who is quick. An answer is a thing you did.
Can a teacher set these for a class?
Not yet. Class-level defaults are on the roadmap and the honest position today is that every learner sets their own.
What happens to my settings if I stop paying?
Nothing. They stay where they are, along with your cards, your hooks and your history. The account drops to the free limits and nothing is deleted.
Start with ten words tonight
Thirty days free, no card. When the trial ends the account drops to the free limits and nothing is deleted.