3,383 German words.Learn, Match, Ganz, Bank
A German vocabulary app for iPhone, Android and the web, with 3,383 words, spaced repetition and audio in both languages.
Vocabulary apps are gamified sameness: streaks, confetti, plastic buttons. I wanted one that felt like a notebook: quiet, made by a person, and serious enough to carry A1 to B1 vocabulary without any of it looking generated.
A word detail keeps the article, meaning, plural, and examples together.
I built the corpus first 3,383 entries with articles, plurals, conjugations and example sentences. Auditing it exposed real problems: For example, German nouns are unlearnable without their gender, so gender had to be visible everywhere.
Eighteen themes organize the vocabulary into manageable groups.
Every colour, edge and breakpoint lives in one file. Gender is told by shape as well as hue, square, capsule, cut corner, so the monochrome theme still works, and so does colour-blind vision.
The Bank gives learners a searchable record of words they have encountered.
Four stages: Learn, Match, Ganz, Bank, plus grammar and listening drills. One typeface at one weight; hierarchy comes from size, rules and ink frames. Five appearances, one rail, two breakpoints, and 6,766 audio clips in a single voice.
It ships on iOS, Android and the web from one codebase. The lesson: constraints beat options. One typeface and one action colour forced better decisions than a palette ever did, and made the whole thing changeable from one file.
Short German stories to read and listen to at the same time, with ten new words in every story.