How to learn words that stick
Seven habits that make the most of a few swapped words a day. None of them takes more than a minute.
1. Pick a pace you can keep for a month
Five, ten, fifteen or twenty new words a day. The number you can keep beats the number that looks good on day one.
Twenty new words a day means about 30 minutes of reviews a day after a year. If that sounds like a lot, start with ten. You can change the pace in settings.
2. Read what you would read anyway
News, forums, recipes, documentation. NativeLingo works on the pages you already read, in your own language, so you do not need special texts.
The swaps stay at about one word in a hundred, so the page still reads like a page.
3. Guess before you hover
When a swapped word appears, try to guess it from the sentence first. Then hover to check.
A guess is a small act of recall, and recall is what makes words stay.
4. Type your reviews, every day
The daily review asks you to type each word. It takes a few minutes, and it does more than another hour of reading.
Short and daily works better than long and rare. Missing one day is fine. The schedule picks up where you left off.
5. Let the schedule decide
You do not need to plan what to review. FSRS spaces each word so you see it just before you would forget it.
If reviews pile up for more than two days, NativeLingo pauses new words until you catch up. Nothing gets moved or deleted.
6. Clear out what you already know
If a swap is too easy, press I know this on the word card. It goes back to the original on the page and leaves your list.
Pause NativeLingo on sites where you need full focus, such as work tools. Use Fewer or More in the popup to change how many words you see.
7. Add speaking and grammar elsewhere
NativeLingo builds vocabulary. Talk with people, take a class or listen to podcasts for the rest.
The words you meet while reading will show up there, and you will recognise them.