Earlier this year, LVocab was officially launched as public beta. A few users have tried the platform since then, and I appreciate them for supporting my new project.

The development of the platform was stopped mainly because I didn't want it to be boring. We're all familiar with apps that help us memorize vocabulary. They're more or less the same in the way they function. These vocabulary apps usually categorize words by word books. As a user, one can create as many books as they want and save new words to these books. And often there's a review page where you can go through the words in a book and test yourself on how well you remember the word. This outlines a typical vocabulary learning system that these existing apps are utilizing.

But at Legendword, creativity is vital.

Personally, I've used several apps of this kind, and the experience is not pleasant. Opening the app and learn from a "book" sounds boring and lacks initiative for me. As a matter of fact, I cannot memorize all of the new words effectively. New words just keep coming and mixing up with each other. I found that only a few of the bunch of words stayed in my memory in the end. The goal of my vocabulary platform is to avoid this inefficient learning method and promote a simple yet powerful way to gain vocabulary as a language learner.

In Public Beta 1.0 (Dev 0.1), which is the newest version as of now, the structure of the platform is mostly done. But soon after I finished the "Vocabulary List" section, I realized I have gotten on the wrong path. However, just recently I have bypassed the traditional thinking and came up with one possible solution that I'm going to implement and test on LVocab.

Instead of doing vocabulary lists/books like what other apps/platforms are doing, I'm going to group words by date. Supposedly we are trying to learn as much new words as possible every day, but as I mentioned above, this method did not benefit me. Rather than learning lots and remember few, we could try learning few but remember all. Every day, the number of new words you are suggested to learn is limited to, for example, two. You can add the two words to LVocab, and learn about their meaning and usage whenever you want. The main goal for that day is to only remember that two words. Every few days, you would pause for one day and do some review. This review may contain 6 or so words, depending on words per day and days since last review. Then, once in a while, you would look back at the vocabulary you have gained in the past, say, one month. This would be more of a self-quiz on your effectiveness of learning. If you still remember most of them well, great, you have successfully increased your vocabulary by a substantial amount; if you think that some words feel distant or you have difficulty recognizing their meanings, then this is a sign to slow down and review a bit more before continuing.

Just a rough thought, and I believe it will work better than the existing methods. I will talk more about this learning method in future blogs. I'm excited about this approach and I hope you are, too! Please wait as I work on the implementation of this system, and test it out together in the next public beta!