How learning works
The app teaches one word at a time with one picture, and it never quizzes you on the picture. Here is the whole loop, and the reasons behind the parts that look unusual.
The card
Every word is a card with four things on it: the Spanish word, its meaning, a short English phrase that sounds like the Spanish, and a picture of that phrase doing something memorable. The picture is the hook. Perro sounds like "pear oar", so the picture is a dog rowing a boat carved from a pear. When you next hear perro, the sound drags the picture up, and the dog comes with it.
Two rules shape every card:
- The background colour is the grammatical gender. Coral means feminine, teal means masculine, sand means the word has no gender. Nothing ever covers, tints or crops that colour. You learn la casa and el perro without ever being drilled on articles, and the colour is always also written in words for anyone who can't see it.
- No writing inside the picture. Not the word, not a label, not a sign in the background. If the picture spelled the answer, you'd read it instead of remembering it. The app draws all text itself.
Three pictures, you pick one
A well-served word has up to three community pictures. When you meet the word, you choose the one that clicks for you. That choice is yours to keep, and it's also a vote: the community site counts it toward which picture leads. A learner choosing the image that actually helped is the most honest signal we have, better than a stranger clicking a thumb.
Sound
Words carry a short Spanish sentence that puts the word in a natural place: Mi casa tiene un jardín pequeño. The first words have theirs; the rest follow as they're written and reviewed. Each sentence is spoken by a synthetic male voice, the same voice across the whole app, as the recordings arrive. A word with no picture yet shows its sentence in place of the picture, with an invitation to submit one. Audio is a pronunciation aid; the app never listens to you, and there is no voice interface.
The test never shows the picture
The picture is a study tool. When the app checks whether you know the word, it shows you the Spanish and asks for the meaning, or the other way round, and you type the answer. The picture stays off the screen. If it were there, you'd be recognising a drawing, not recalling a word.
You set the review date
Most vocabulary apps decide when you'll see a word again, using a formula. This one doesn't. After each test you choose the interval yourself: tomorrow, in three days, next week, next month. The result of the test never moves a date on its own. That was a deliberate decision by the product's owner, and it is pinned by a test in the code so it can't drift back in by accident. The reason is simple: you know whether that word felt solid, and a formula doesn't.
What the phone holds, and what it doesn't
Your progress lives on the phone. The only thing the server keeps is an anonymous activity mailbox you can switch off. You can export your progress to a file and restore from it; that file is the backup. There is no account recovery code to lose.
The word pack updates in the background, but it never applies an update without asking. When new pictures or words arrive you get a now-or-later choice, and a receipt after.
Where the pictures come from
From the community, through a gate. Members on a plan submit pictures on the community site; every picture is checked before anyone sees it, by the safety scanner or, until it's switched on, by a person; the community votes; and when a word settles, its winner is published to the app. Nothing reaches the phone that hasn't been through both gates. How voting works · Submitting a picture.