How far apart each word's turns have stretched. Words move rightwards as you keep getting them right — that widening gap is the learning.
How many words come back to you on each of the next seven days, if you keep up.
Rate each word honestly. Nothing is scored — this only decides where each word enters the schedule, so guessing high just means you meet it again sooner anyway.
Ranks 1–1000 are ordered by frequency in a 27-million-word corpus of spoken Spanish. Beyond 1000 sits a supplement of everyday words that frequency ranking alone missed. Click a band of the coverage bar to filter the list; click the squares in any row to re-rate a word.
| # | Spanish | English | Type | Rating | Comes back |
|---|
Two things decide whether a vocabulary app is worth your time: which words it teaches, and when it shows them to you again. Here is what this one does, and why.
A few words do most of the work in any language. In Spanish, the top 1000 dictionary words — ser counts once, covering es, son, era, fue — make up about 75–85% of everyday speech.
You may have read "1000 words = 90%". That is a bit generous. 90% takes around 2000–3000 words, and 95% takes 4000–5000. Still, no other 1000 words you learn will buy you this much.
Most apps assume you know nothing. You don't — some Spanish words look like English ones, and you have picked things up. So you sort the list first. It takes about twenty minutes, and it means the app starts from what you actually know:
| You said | What happens |
|---|---|
| Never seen it | Learned from scratch, soon. |
| Heard it | Same, with a slightly longer first gap. |
| Think I know it | Skips the lesson. Comes back in a day or two to test the hunch. |
| I know it | Comes back in 4–10 days. If you were wrong, one Forgot puts it back at the start. |
Guessing high costs you nothing — you just meet the word again sooner. Words you say you know don't use up your daily quota of new ones.
Making yourself remember. Digging a word out of your head is what makes it stick. Just reading it again does much less. That is why the answer stays hidden until you have tried, and why you can type it instead of flipping.
Leaving gaps. Spacing reviews out beats cramming, by a lot. The best moment to see a word again is just before you would forget it — late enough that it takes effort, early enough that you still get it. That small struggle is the point.
Fixed gaps (one day, three days, a week) waste time on easy words and lose hard ones. Instead the app keeps track, per word, of how well you know it, how tricky you find it, and how likely you are to remember it right now. Every answer updates all three, and it picks a gap that gives you about a 9-in-10 chance of remembering.
Two useful side effects. Answering after a long gap is worth more than after a short one, so being late is not a problem. And forgetting a word does not send it back to zero — it keeps most of what it had earned.
This is FSRS, the scheduler Anki now uses by default. It needs roughly a fifth fewer reviews than the older method for the same result.
Spanish → English is recognising a word: enough to read and follow speech. English → Spanish is producing it: what you need to actually say something. They are separate memories, so each word is two cards with their own schedule.
They don't start together. The English → Spanish card waits until you can reliably recognise the word. Trying to produce a word you can't yet recognise is just failing on purpose. You can turn that off in Settings.
Cards arrive shuffled, and both directions are mixed together, so you never get an easy run of similar ones. It feels worse and works better.
They come from a Wiktionary frequency list built from 27 million words of film and TV subtitles — people talking, which is what you want. That list counts every form separately, so forms were folded back into dictionary words and re-ranked, then tidied by hand: names, filler noises and rude words out, a few obvious everyday gaps (weekdays, seasons) in. Every English meaning appears only once, so a question never has two right answers.
Ranks 1–1000 are ordered by how common the word is. The last 130 are a supplement: everyday words that frequency alone missed, found by comparing this list against a popular "1000 Spanish words" page that turned out to be the Fry 1000 English list run through a translator — which is why it offered lata (a tin can) for "can". Its mistakes were skipped; its genuinely missing words were kept.
Sources: the Wiktionary Spanish frequency lists, checked against Davies, A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. Scheduling: FSRS. The learning ideas come from research on testing yourself and on spacing practice out.
Everything lives in this browser's local storage. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. Export regularly if you care about the progress.
Moving between a laptop and a phone: save a file on the device you just studied on, then merge it on the other one. Merging combines both sides — each word keeps whichever device answered it most recently — so it is safe in either direction and safe even if you studied on both. It never deletes anything.
Replace instead of merging — only when you want this device to exactly match the file.
| space | Show answer |
| 1 2 3 4 | Forgot / Barely / Got it / Instant — and the four triage ratings |
| enter | Submit typed answer |
| u | Undo last triage rating |