Über

What a thousand words gets you

The most frequent words cover an enormous share of running speech — but comprehension needs about 95 % coverage, and unassisted reading about 98 %. This course tops out at 66 % with 241 words.

So: this builds the skeleton, and the coverage number on the home screen is measured rather than promised. It is not a route to fluency and does not pretend to be one.

Method

Retrieval practice

Nothing is ever shown to be read. Every contact with a word is an attempt to recall it.

Spaced repetition

FSRS schedules each skill separately. You never see an interval — the scheduling is the app's problem, not yours.

Desirable difficulties

The same word escalates: recognise it, hear it after 1 day of stability, use it in a sentence after 3, produce it cold after 10.

Interleaving

No two consecutive exercises share a word or a skill. It feels worse and works better.

Comprehensible input

Sentences are only scheduled once every word in them is known. The build fails otherwise, so the guarantee is structural.

Gender from day one

A noun is never shown without its article, and gender carries a shape as well as a colour. Wrong articles fossilise; nothing repairs them later.

Ordering

Words are not taught in frequency order. At each step the compiler picks the word that turns the most sentences from "one word missing" into "fully readable", breaking ties by corpus frequency. Pure frequency order leaves you unable to read a single whole sentence for a very long time.

Sources

• OpenSubtitles 2018 (hermitdave/FrequencyWords) CC BY-SA 4.0 · 151,705,378 tokens, 50,000 distinct forms
• Lexicon, sentences, texts Original work · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Pronunciation audio — Wikimedia Commons German Wiktionary pronunciation project · CC BY-SA / CC0, per clip
• Archivo · JetBrains Mono SIL Open Font License

Course content is CC BY-SA 4.0 deliberately: it keeps the door open to Wiktionary as the upstream source for gender, plural and conjugation data. The application code is MIT.

Audio

Every word is a human recording from the German Wiktionary pronunciation project, via Wikimedia Commons. Each clip is loudness-normalised so a drill does not jump 20 dB between cards, and all of them are packaged with the app — audio works offline.

Example sentences and the texts have no recordings; nobody has read this course's invented sentences aloud. Those buttons use your device's speech synthesis and say so.

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Your data

Everything stays on this device, in IndexedDB. There is no account, no server and no analytics. Clearing it cannot be undone.