Vocabulary flashcards: Vocabuo

What Vocabuo is for

Vocabuo is a vocabulary app for learning English, Spanish, German, French, Italian or Swedish. Its central idea is that the words you study come from material you already read or hear, such as news articles, song lyrics, ebooks or short stories. It suits a learner who reads or listens in one of those six languages and wants a deck built from that material rather than a fixed course.

Turning your own texts into word decks

You feed the app a text and it pulls out the vocabulary in it. According to the listing, words are reduced to their basic forms, with conjugations and prefixes taken into account, so a conjugated verb is stored under the form you would look up. The result is a collection of words ready for practice.

Practicing with swipe cards and example sentences

Each card is cleared by swiping left or right. A word can be shown in an unlimited number of sentences, so you meet it in several contexts rather than one. The listing says the scheduling follows spaced repetition.

When you reveal the answer, the sentence is pronounced for you, so you hear the word in running speech as well as on the card.

Looking up meaning, origin and related words

An explanation button on a card opens the word's meaning, its origin and words related to it. This sits alongside the example sentences, so a single word can be checked from both its usage and its background.

Adding words from videos and websites

Besides pasted text, the listing says vocabulary can be added from videos and from websites you read. A deck can therefore grow from what you watch or browse, not only from documents you prepare in advance.