Keep a personal vocabulary journal

A vocabulary journal is one list per account, and every entry arrived from a lesson you did. There is no catalogue to browse, no frequency list to work through, and nothing pre-loaded for a language you have not studied. If the list is empty, that is because no lesson has been imported yet, not because you have not unlocked it.

That constraint is the point. A course decides which thousand words come first for everyone. A journal answers a narrower, more useful question: what came up in your Italian lesson on Tuesday, and what does it mean in the sentences you met it in?

It also means the journal cannot be sold as a course, because it is not one. It has no sequence, no unit gates and no advice about what to learn next. The order is whatever your lessons gave you.

Each entry carries four things and no more:

1. The word in the form you met. For nouns, with the article, because that is the part of the word that has a gender and that is what you have to say out loud.
2. One meaning, in your language. The translation you understood, not every sense the word can take.
3. The sentence from your lesson. This is the part a word list cannot have, and the part that makes the review readable rather than abstract.
4. Its own review state. When it was last seen, how stable it is, and when it comes back.

Language content can be long: German compounds and a full Latvian sentence are ordinary entries, so the layout wraps rather than truncates. The page on cards from notes covers how a lesson becomes entries; this page is about what the journal is once they arrive.

Review works on each entry separately. A word you answered confidently today moves further out; a word you missed comes back sooner. Answering an easy word does not push the hard one away, and clearing the queue one day does not set the schedule for the rest of the list.

Progress is deliberately slow to declare a word learned: an entry counts as learned once its review interval reaches three weeks of stability, which means several successful recalls on separate days rather than one good session. Learned entries stay in the schedule; they are not retired, and they remain on the list.

You can see the shape of the list in the app: due entries, entries in learning, and the fifty most recently learned words with their dates. That list is a record, not a score. Nothing there is compared with other learners.

Lesson text is private, so it is stored differently from the shared vocabulary data. The sentence and answer from your lesson sit in a record tied to your account and to the sense you were studying, separate from the shared word data that every learner reads. Clearing your account data removes the journal with it; the data deletion page lists what is removed and how to ask.

Nothing in the journal is published, ranked or shared. A shared group lesson gives each member their own entries and their own schedule, so the same lesson can produce different journals for two people in the same room.

• No export. You cannot download the list as CSV or Anki today, and there is no import from either. For a journal you intend to keep for years, that is a real gap and we would rather name it than let you discover it in year two.
• No tags, folders or topics. Entries are grouped by when they arrived and when they are due, not by theme.
• No free-text notes field. There is nowhere to add your own remark to an entry yet, so do not plan a workflow around one.
• No manual add. Entries arrive through a lesson import; you cannot type a word straight into the list.
• No browsing other journals. There is no shared deck marketplace and no public profile to visit.

Vocabulary entries are supported for English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Latvian and Swedish; conjugation entries for English and Italian. Italian is the deepest path, which is why the public demo uses it.

A paper notebook has one advantage: writing the word by hand is itself a first pass. Its weakness is everything after that, because a closed notebook never brings a word back at the moment you are about to forget it. The journal keeps the first pass cheap and does the second part for you.

The routine is small by design. Add a lesson, look at the entries it produced, delete the ones you already know, then review when the app says something is due. Three short sessions in a week do more for a set of lesson words than one long session at the weekend, because the spacing is what does the work.

The demo runs a fixed Italian sample lesson in the browser if you want to see a journal without creating one.

If you are a tutor deciding whether to hand this to students, the tutor page covers the shared-lesson side, and the guide to language learning apps compares the categories.

LanguageRecap is not affiliated with Anki, Quizlet or any other app mentioned on this site. Written November 2026.