Help and keyboard shortcuts

Inside a session

• Enter checks your answer and continues.
• Ctrl + Space hears the word again. Ctrl + S hears it in a sentence. Ctrl + D shows the meaning.
• Ctrl + H reveals the next letter (the card is rated Hard). Ctrl + → gives up and shows the word.
• Ctrl + T on a miss: it was just a typo.
• Esc pauses. Leaving saves your progress.

How the schedule works

Each word has its own timer. Get it right and the gap before you see it again grows: a day, a few days, a week, a month. Miss it and it comes back sooner. The app rates every answer for you from correctness, time and hints; there are no buttons to press.

New words

By default you try a new word blind first. If you type it right without hesitating, it is marked known, comes back in about a week to make sure, and you never sit through a lesson for it. If the typing looked uncertain (a correction, a replay, a long pause) the app asks whether you knew it or guessed; a lucky guess is shown properly right away, like a miss. If you miss it, you see the word with its syllables, its meaning, a sentence, its parts and the hard part, then the word is hidden and you type it from memory, until it is right; it comes back once more later in the session. Beginners can switch to "show me first" in Settings.

Audio

Every word and sentence is read aloud by a computer voice (Google's Kore voice, in American English), and every clip is checked by listening software for the right word and pronunciation before it goes live. If one sounds wrong, press the audio-problem button on the word page and we will make it again.

American or British?

Everything is American English for now: the voice, the word lists, the default spellings. British spellings such as colour, centre and organise are accepted as correct answers, so British writers are not marked wrong, but we do not yet have a British voice or a British curriculum. We would like to add both.