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 uses the SM-2 family of scheduling — the same idea behind most serious flashcard tools — and keeps the numbers conservative:

  1. Review 1

    the next day

  2. Review 2

    six days later

  3. Review 3+

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

    6 → 15 → 38 days for a word you always get right

A miss resets the word to a one-day gap and lowers its ease factor; a confident answer raises it. 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 1 day · day 1 · ease 2.50

  2. Review 2

    next in 6 days · day 7 · ease 2.50

  3. Review 3

    next in 15 days · day 22 · ease 2.50

  4. Review 4

    next in 38 days · day 60 · ease 2.50

Same formula the app uses (SM-2: 1 day, 6 days, then previous gap × ease 1.3–2.5).

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.