Last week I learned a German expression from one of our users: ‘einmal ist keinmal’, meaning ‘once is never’. I couldn’t have picked a better expression to describe Lingua.ly’s vision for effective vocabulary building: smart repetition! If you see a word once, it will most likely be forgotten as soon as you find out what it means (yes, even with best online dictionary).
However, just repetition may not be enough for a word to settle in your memory (or ‘consolidate’). To really ‘know’ a word so you can access it when needed, even after a long period of time, you need to be exposed to it:
1. When the time is right: Repeating a word 10 times now might be effective for the short term, but chances are you won’t remember it if asked in two weeks or a month. Lingua.ly uses a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) to invite you to practice the words that you need to review most (just before you forget them). Our notification system gently nudges you to practice: you’ll see the number of words waiting for you in your practice inbox on the Lingua.ly icon.
2. When you have the time: We don’t believe in long, tedious, practice sessions. It’s very hard to make time for them in our busy lives, and very easy to give them up all together. Only got a minute to practice? choose the ‘coffee break’ practice session (5 words). Feel like a longer stretch? Choose the ‘regular size’ (15 words) or the ‘word feast’ (30 words). We’ll make sure the words you practice will be the words you need to practice the most!
3. ‘In the wild’: Lists, flashcards, and smart intervals may be effective methods to commit new vocabulary to memory. However, they are very far from the way we naturally learn a language. Nobody sits down a toddler or a native speaker and hands them a list of words to memorize. In life, new vocabulary is learned ‘in the wild’: you hear words repeated in different contexts, and learn how to use them. The more a word is relevant to your life, the earlier you’ll remember how to use it (this is why kids learn ‘cookie’ way before ‘broccoli’).
This may be hard to replicate when you’re learning a foreign language and have to find time for learning in your daily (and busy) life. In Lingua.ly we believe that the words you learn should be the ones that are most relevant to you. When you read an article that you’re truly interested in, finding out what a word means is more than a boring drill – it’s essential to understanding the overall message, and your brain may even be convinced it’s worthwhile remembering.
As we already know, seeing a word just once is not enough. That’s why Lingua.ly automatically saves the words you look up, generates flashcards for future practice (see above), and most importantly – searches for them in real articles from around the web that also match your vocabulary and interests. This way, you’ll ‘stumble upon’ the words that you are trying to learn naturally, while you read other articles that you are passionate about. This will not only strengthen your memory of the word (through the power of repetition), but also expose you to different meanings of it in different contexts so you can actually learn how to use it.
Care to practice a particular word? When
This is what we mean when we say: ‘bringing language to life. Your life!’. When learning is integrated seamlessly with your daily browsing behavior, it becomes a fun, natural, and effective process!