Vocabulary

Upgrade the Sentence

A full sentence with one bland word highlighted, and a set of replacements. The trick is that several of them are upgrades — only one fits this context. No microphone needed.

Round: 15 cards
Daily goal: 15 cards
Answer: Tap the fitting word
Scheduling: Leitner boxes

The method

Why it works

Vocabulary drills usually test whether you know a word. This one tests whether you know when to use it — the options are shuffled and more than one is a genuine improvement, so a general sense of “fancier is better” gets you nowhere.

Precision
Trains the habit of choosing the exact word for the moment rather than the first acceptable one.
Register
You start to feel when a word is too strong, too weak, or just right for the sentence around it.
Context, not flashcards
The word is always shown inside a real sentence, because that is the only place the answer exists.

How a session runs

Step by step

1
Read the sentence and find the highlighted bland word.
2
Tap the replacement that fits the context most precisely.
3
See the answer immediately; the card's place in the review schedule updates.
4
A round is 15 cards, mixing words that are due for review with new ones.

Evaluation

How it's scored

Like Explain the Word, a completed round is saved so it appears in your session history, but its result is a “percent of words learned”, not a delivery metric — so it never enters the speech scores, fluency or WPM analytics.

Not a speech score — vocabulary progress

Round result

% learned

How many of the round's cards you got right, plus how many are queued to revisit.

Leitner box

schedule

Per-word progress, stored separately from Explain the Word's, so the two exercises never interfere with each other's schedules.

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

correct → box + 1  (capped at 5)
missed  → box 0, requeued for a later round

Round build

session = wordsDueForReview (oldest first) + newWords,  up to 15

Details worth knowing

Which day it is comes from your own day boundary rather than from UTC, so a late-night session lands on the day you think it did.
The streak is shared with Explain the Word and the rest of the app — it is a single global practice streak, not one per exercise.

Keep going