Hear the word, not just read it
A word you have only seen is half-learned. Sound is what memory files it under, and what you will need in a conversation. Why every card has a speaker — and what to do with it.
There is a kind of learner who knows thousands of words and freezes when someone speaks. They can read the newspaper and cannot order coffee. The gap is not vocabulary. It is that every one of those words went in through the eyes and never through the ears.
Memory stores sounds
When you hold a word in short-term memory — a phone number, a name someone just said — you are rehearsing its sound, not its spelling. Psychologists call this the phonological loop, and it is the door most new words come through. A word with no sound attached is harder to hold, harder to recall, and impossible to recognise when spoken.
Reading a word gives it a shape. Hearing it gives it a place. If you have ever known a word for years and then been surprised by how it is pronounced — quinoa, hyperbole, Worcester — you have met a word that got a shape and no place.
Two words that look alike, sound different
In many languages the spelling underdetermines the sound. English is the famous case; French, Danish and Tibetan are worse. In others the spelling is honest but the sounds are foreign: Georgian's ejective consonants, Arabic's emphatics, the tones of Vietnamese and Mandarin. A learner who reads ma in Mandarin has learned almost nothing — it is four different words depending on the tone, and only the ear can tell them apart.
This is why a card that only shows text is a weak card. It teaches you to recognise the word on a page, which is the one place you will not be tested under pressure.
What the speaker button does
Every card in Mullawo has a speaker next to each word. Tap it and the word is read aloud in that language — by the phone's own voice where it has one, and from our server for the languages phones cannot speak: Persian, Kazakh, Azerbaijani, Armenian and Georgian.
Tap it a second time and the word is read slowly. That is the moment the ear catches what it missed — the extra syllable, the glottal catch, the tone contour. Then tap once more for normal speed, and hear it whole.
The alphabet screens do the same for each letter, so the sounds are yours before the words are.
Use the transcription as a map, not a substitute
Under each word there is a transcription — IPA for most languages, the national Latin system for a few. It tells you what the sound is: that Ukrainian г is a voiced h and not g, that Polish ł is w. Read it once, then listen and check. Do not learn the transcription instead of the sound; it is a map of a place you should visit.
You can hide it in Settings once the alphabet is comfortable. Most people do after the first few weeks.
Say it back
Hearing is half. The other half is producing the sound yourself — even quietly, even badly. The act of saying a word plants it far deeper than reading it, because now the memory has a motor trace as well as a sound. Tap, listen, say. Three seconds a card.
A small routine
- New card: read it, tap the speaker, say it.
- Not sure you heard it? Tap again — slow.
- Reviewing: say the word before you flip, then check the sound.
Do that and the freeze goes away. Words you have heard and said are the ones that come out when someone speaks to you — which was the point of learning them.