V · Narrative vocabulary
Wort
Story
A German vocabulary app that teaches through short historical fiction instead of drills. Target words are woven into real sentences, each one clickable into a full grammar card, on a bracket-markup parser written from scratch.
Vocab apps that teach words in isolation, flashcard decks and drill apps, strip away the context that makes language actually stick. I wanted to test whether words absorbed inside an emotionally engaging story would retain better than words absorbed through repetition.
A reading app where each story is short historical fiction with German words and phrases woven directly into the English prose. A hand-built bracket-markup parser tags each word as clickable, opening a full grammar card with declension tables, conjugations, and a short etymological or mnemonic hook. A companion fill-in-the-blank quiz mode then asks learners to produce the correctly declined form.
The stories that worked best were not generic examples. They were historically grounded, emotionally weighted narratives about identity and displacement. Building the parser also taught me that a small hand-rolled DSL, kept specific to the problem, can be simpler and more maintainable than reaching for a general parsing library.