RepetoVocabulary is one of the easiest parts of language learning to count, but a large word list is not the same as usable recall. Ten new words a day would introduce 3,650 items in a year; whether you can still recognize or produce them depends on context, retrieval practice, and the review load you can sustain.
The problem is that the standard tools quietly fight you.
Why word lists and app streaks stall
A word list tests recognition in a fixed order — by day three you know that la nevera comes after el horno, which is not the same as knowing either word. Streak-based apps show you words on their schedule, tuned for engagement, not on the schedule your memory needs. And classic flashcard apps have the opposite failure: the schedule is right, but you pay for it up front, typing both sides of every card, looking up genders, hunting for example sentences. At two minutes per card, today’s ten words cost twenty minutes before the first review happens. That’s the step where the routine dies.
The practical fix has two halves: a real scheduler and a card-creation workflow fast enough to keep using.
What a vocabulary card actually needs
A bare pair like manzana → apple can work for simple recognition, but it often lacks the context needed to use the word. Depending on your goal, useful additions include:
- An example sentence. A word inside “como una manzana al día” shows usage and gives the answer context.
- Grammatical facts you’ll trip on later. Gender for Spanish and German nouns, the reading for a kanji, irregular plurals. Learning manzana without feminine means learning it twice.
- One word per card — never a list of five siblings on one back. Related words interfere with each other; the scheduler needs to track each one separately.
The tradeoff is time: filling several fields by hand can make a small daily vocabulary batch expensive to maintain.
Type the word. That’s the whole job.
This is the part Repeto was built around: in a Spanish → English deck, you type manzana and press Enter. The deck’s generation profile writes the rest — apple, noun, feminine, an example sentence with its translation — because the deck knows what a good card looks like for its subject. Type ten words in a row and they land as ten cards, filling in as they generate. The live demo on our landing page is the actual interaction.
Because the profile is per-deck, a Japanese flashcard deck does the right different thing: type 隣 and the card comes back with the reading (となり), the meaning, and its part of speech. A Spanish flashcard deck can keep gender, article, and examples together. And when a deck needs steering, its settings take plain instructions — “always Latin-American Spanish”, “include IPA”, “example sentences in past tense” — so the hundredth card follows house style as strictly as the first.
Where do the ten words come from? The best source is whatever you’re already reading or watching. Paste an article URL or a YouTube link onto the deck and Repeto pulls the vocabulary worth keeping out of it — the full material-to-deck workflow is covered in its own post.
The scheduling half
Every card goes straight onto FSRS scheduling — the same open algorithm modern Anki uses. In practice: each review is four buttons (Again, Hard, Good, Easy), easy words retreat to monthly reviews within a few weeks, and the words you personally struggle with come back sooner. At ten new words a day the review queue settles into a session you can finish with a coffee — and reviewing is free in Repeto, permanently, whatever your card count.
The routine, complete:
- Once a day, type the new words you met into their deck (or paste the article they came from).
- Clear the review queue. Answer honestly — Again is information, not failure.
- That’s it. There is no step three, which is precisely why it survives busy weeks.
Starting from an existing deck
If you have years of vocabulary in Anki, import the .apkg — cards and media come across and continue on FSRS here, and you can export everything back out the same way whenever you like. Otherwise start from zero at app.repeto.ai: the free tier covers unlimited manual cards, unlimited review, and 10 AI generations a week — enough to run the ten-words-a-day routine for a real test drive before Pro makes generation unlimited.
Ten words tonight. The deck writes the cards; FSRS makes sure you still know them in March.