Beta

Guide

How SveLingo speeds up your Swedish learning

SveLingo is built around one loop: look a word up, save it, and let a spaced-repetition schedule bring it back right before you would forget it. Here is how each step works and why it beats re-reading word lists.

By SveLingo · Published

Look up a word
🔍Look updictionary entry📚Savebecomes a card🔁Reviewon a scheduleevery review tells the scheduler when to ask again
Three actions, one loop. Nothing here needs setting up: saving a word switches the schedule on.

Step 1 — Look up, don't guess

Every SveLingo entry is a full dictionary page, not a word pair. Search förstå and you get the English meaning, the verb group and its forms (förstår, förstod, förstått), pronunciation audio, real example sentences, the CEFR level and how frequent the word is in Swedish. Nouns show their en/ett gender next to the headword because that is the fact learners most often have to look up twice.

Because the entry already contains the grammar, you never have to leave the page to check a form. Each row in the Word Forms table links to the chapter of the grammar book that explains it.

Step 2 — Save it, and it becomes a card

One tap on Add to wordbook turns the entry into a review card that carries the meaning, the forms, the level and frequency, and example sentences with audio; the full entry — en/ett gender and the whole inflection table — stays one tap away. You can keep your own wordbooks — words from class, the news, the street — or start from the curated CEFR A1–B1 and SFI wordbooks so the first hundred words are the ones you will actually meet.

Not sure where to begin? The free five-minute level check estimates your vocabulary size and points you at the right wordbook.

Step 3 — Review on a schedule, not on a whim

Memory research going back to Ebbinghaus shows that most new vocabulary fades within days unless it is recalled. Each successful recall flattens the forgetting curve, so the next review can wait longer. SveLingo settles each word once per session on what actually happened — a clean pass, a recovery after a miss, or three misses — rather than on a grade you give yourself, and keeps the numbers conservative:

  1. First review

    two days after you learn it (one day if you missed it during the lesson)

  2. Every clean review

    the previous gap × your ease factor (1.3–2.5)

    2 → 5 → 13 → 33 days for a word you always get right

  3. After a miss

    missed but recovered: 60% of the gap · forgot outright: back to one day

Answering correctly in under four seconds grows the gap faster once it is a week or more; every miss lowers the ease factor. A gap of 30 days or more marks the word as mastered, and mastery is shown on every saved word as a level from 0 to 5.
Try it: how would you answer at each review?
  1. Review 1

    next in 2 days · day 2 · ease 2.50

  2. Review 2

    next in 5 days · day 7 · ease 2.50

  3. Review 3

    next in 13 days · day 20 · ease 2.50

  4. Review 4

    mastered on day 53 · ease 2.50 · the gap reached 33 days, so no further review is scheduled

Same rules the app uses: 2 days first (1 if missed during the lesson), then gap × ease 1.3–2.5; 60% of the gap after a recovered miss, back to 1 day after three misses; a gap of 30 days or more counts as mastered and the word leaves the review queue.

Your daily session mixes the words that are due today with up to 20 new words (the default goal). A word you keep getting right rests for weeks; a word you miss comes back tomorrow. Ten focused minutes a day is enough to keep several hundred words alive, and the app tells you when the day is done.

Step 4 — Learn the pattern, not just the word

Swedish rewards learners who see the system: stå gives förstå, bestå, uppstå and avstånd; a house is hus, huset, hus, husen. Word pages surface the word family and the common phrases a word appears in, taken from a corpus of real Swedish sentences rather than generated. When you want the rule itself, the grammar book covers it in short chapters — start with En, ett and the definite form or the preterite and supine — and Mini Grammar drills the forms in two-minute sets.

Web at your desk, iPhone on the bus

The dictionary is free without an account. A free account adds saved words, wordbooks and the daily review, and everything syncs between the web app and the SveLingo iPhone app, which also adds a daily reminder and offline audio.

Create a free account, or read how this compares with generic flashcard apps.