Vocabulary

Explain the Word

A word appears and you have to make someone else understand it without saying it — the skill that saves you every time a word slips your mind mid-sentence. No microphone needed, so it works on a train or in a shared office.

Round: 7 cards
Daily goal: 7 words
Modes: Self-check or written
Scheduling: Leitner boxes

The method

Why it works

Paraphrasing under constraint is the whole exercise. In hard mode the card shows a list of off-limits words — the obvious ones — so the easy route is closed and you have to find the definition rather than the synonym.

Paraphrasing
Trains the skill that rescues you when a word will not come: describing the thing instead of naming it.
Vocabulary
You meet richer, more precise words — and have to think hard enough about each one to explain it.
Spaced repetition
Words you got come back later and later; words you missed come back the same day. Nothing is quietly dropped.

How a session runs

Step by step

1
Choose easy mode (no off-limits words) or hard mode (off-limits words shown on the card).
2
Explain the word — in your head, then self-check; or type it out for an AI grade.
3
Each answer updates that word's place in the review schedule.
4
A round is 7 cards, with a clearly visible end.

Evaluation

How it's scored

Vocabulary rounds save a “percent of words learned” result rather than a delivery metric, and are excluded from the speech analytics on Home and Progress. What they do drive is the spaced-repetition schedule, and — in written mode — a graded verdict per answer.

Not a speech score — vocabulary progress

Written grade

0–100

Pass at 70, excellent at 85. Premium and tester tiers only; it runs a text-only model call and deliberately does not consume your monthly coach-review quota.

Leitner box

schedule

A correct answer moves the word up one box; a miss resets it to box 0, where it returns later the same day rather than immediately.

The formula

Transcribed from the scorer that ships in the app. Every constant is pinned to this methodology version, so the same take always produces the same number.

Review schedule

box       0    1    2    3     4     5
due in    0d   1d   3d   7d   14d   30d

got it  → box + 1  (capped at 5)
missed  → box 0, back later the same day

Written grading

score ≥ 85   excellent
score ≥ 70   pass — counts as “got it”
below  70   the word comes back

wrong language → score capped at 20

Details worth knowing

A reported off-limits violation is only accepted when the word, or a close inflection of it, genuinely appears in what you typed — the model sometimes “corrects” a near-miss into a taboo word you never wrote, and that must not fail your round.
If the light grader reports a violation that is not in your text at all, the whole grading is treated as suspect and the answer is re-graded once on a stronger model.
In easy mode the card carries no off-limits list, so the only legitimate violation is the target word itself — thematic taboo words the model invents are discarded.

The coach review