How Peroglot works

Why the course is built the way it is: typing over tapping, and how repetition is scheduled.

• Why typing beats multiple choice

  Recognising a word among four tiles and producing it from nothing are different skills. Only one of them is speaking. Here is why every exercise in the course is you, typing a whole sentence.

• How spaced repetition works, and why the gap keeps growing

  You forget most of what you learn within days unless you are asked for it again at the right moment. Here is what the research says about that moment, and how the course turns it into a schedule for every word and rule you know.

• Why a mistake lowers one word, not the lesson

  A sentence with five words carries five or six rules at once. When one of them breaks, the app has to know which, or it will make you repeat the wrong thing. Here is how the check finds the one item that failed, and what happens to it.

• Why flashcards are not enough

  Spaced flashcards are the best tool most serious learners have, and they still leave you unable to say a sentence. What a card cannot test, and what has to sit around it.

• Do you need grammar to speak a language?

  One camp says just speak and the rules will come. The other spent years on tables and still cannot order a coffee. Both are describing a real failure. What grammar is actually for, and the one way of learning it that does not end in either.

• A word is all of its forms

  Knowing "go" is not knowing "went". Knowing a noun is not knowing what it looks like after a preposition. Why every form of a word is treated as something to learn on its own, and what changes when it is.

• Why grammar should be explained in your language

  The same rule is easy for one learner and the hardest thing in the course for another, depending only on the language they already speak. Why an explanation written for everybody is written for nobody, and what an adapted course does instead.

• How many words do you need to speak a language?

  Fewer than you fear for a conversation, more than the apps admit for anything real, and the number is the wrong thing to count anyway. What the frequency research says, and what it leaves out.

• What A1, A2 and B1 actually mean

  Every course promises a level and almost nobody can say what one is. What you can do at each step of the European scale, how long each one takes, and why a level is only real when it is tested by what you can produce.