Verbamor
Author
Colin Taylor
I build Verbamor, an iOS app that turns the words from your own lessons and conversations into flashcards. Every comparison, guide and blog post on verbamor.com goes out under my name.
Why I write about memory and language learning
I got serious about Spanish and Portuguese with 2 lessons a week on italki, for a while. My tutor taught me good material, and by the next lesson most of it was gone. Building flashcards by hand turned into a second job I never kept up with, so I built an app that does it.
Today I record my own conversations in Spanish, and the words I reached for and didn't have go into my deck. Over 300 hours of lessons have gone through the app. That's the problem these pieces keep coming back to: how to keep what a lesson teaches you, and what the research actually says about it.
The longer version, including how the app started, is on the about page.
How these pieces are written
Every piece on this site is drafted with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, from a written brief. I review and edit each one before it goes live, and I'm responsible for what it says. You should know that before you trust any of it.
The brief carries the rules the draft has to pass:
- A claim about a study links the paper itself, not a blog post about it. If the full text was paywalled and couldn't be read, the source list says so.
- A price or feature claim about another app comes from that company's own page, with the date it was read. When a company won't publish a number, the piece says that instead of borrowing one from an affiliate site.
- Every comparison names the kind of person who should pick the other app.
- Opinion and my own experience are marked as mine, not dressed up as findings.
When a piece is wrong, I fix it and the modified date changes. I don't quietly delete things. If you spot a mistake, email support@verbamor.com. It comes to me.
Everything I've written here
Grouped by kind, newest blog posts first. The research behind the app itself is on the research page.
Comparisons
- What Anki costs: US$24.99 on iOS, free everywhere else
- Duolingo alongside a tutor: what it can't cover
- What to do with italki lesson notes after class
- Quizlet for language learning: where it breaks
- Anki vs Quizlet: what changed in 2026
- Apps like Duolingo: what I could verify
- Babbel vs Duolingo: check the ceiling first
- Babbel vs Rosetta Stone: the prices, checked
- Busuu vs Babbel: the ceiling decides it
- Busuu vs Duolingo: which one you should buy
- Duolingo vs Pimsleur: the price question
- Duolingo vs Rosetta Stone: prices checked today
- Jumpspeak vs Duolingo: the prices checked
- LingoDeer vs Duolingo: the real prices
- Mango vs Duolingo: check your library first
- Memrise vs Duolingo: which one to pay for
- Pimsleur vs Babbel: prices checked Sept 2026
- Rosetta Stone vs Duolingo vs Babbel
- Rosetta Stone vs Pimsleur: prices checked today
- Speak vs Duolingo: the prices and languages
Guides
- Automate flashcards from your lessons: what it costs
- Best app to learn Italian
- Best app to learn Portuguese
- The best app to learn Russian
- The best language learning app
- The best way to learn Italian
- Best way to learn Spanish for adults
- Russian Cyrillic alphabet pronunciation
- How to make flashcards from an italki lesson
- Review vocabulary from lesson recordings: the tools
- Which apps transcribe a language lesson?
- Preply lesson vocabulary review, in any language
- Why you forget what your tutor taught, and the fix
- Spaced repetition for language learners
- How to make flashcards from a language lesson
- What to do after a language lesson
Flashcards by language
- Spanish and French conjugation apps
- French flashcards: what they cost
- Italian flashcards: how long 1,000 words take
- Portuguese flashcards: Brazilian or European first
- Russian flashcards: the alphabet comes first
- Spanish verb flashcards that teach forms
- Spanish flashcards: where the words come from
Free tools
- Anki review load planner, before you build a collection
- Cognate and false friend checker, free · Verbamor
- FSRS forgetting curve calculator, free · Verbamor
- Spanish vocabulary size estimator, free · Verbamor
- Study abroad contact hours calculator · Verbamor
- Text coverage checker: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese
- Tutor cost per word retained, calculator · Verbamor
Blog: tactics
- The three top Lingopie reviews contradict each other
- Auditing your cards and deleting the bad ones
- Pimsleur review: the money math nobody does
- What Duolingo costs, according to Duolingo
- The ten-minute post-lesson review, and why yours never happens
- Anki's actual default settings, from the source
- FSI's Category IV hours don't divide by FSI's own week
- Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese: picking one
- A semester in Peru buys about 300 hours of Spanish
- Missed a week of flashcards: a 4 day recovery
- The cheapest way to learn Spanish, per hour
- Capture habits after your first 500 cards
- Anki and language apps: what each one costs you
- The six days after the lesson are where the money goes
- Your tutor taught you 15 words. You kept 3.
- Why you understand the show but not the person at the counter
- How many flashcards a day should you actually do?
- How many words you actually need before the trip
- How to pick a first show that is actually at your level
- What to ask for in your first lesson so lesson 2 is better
- Subtitles: target language, native, or none
- Graded readers work, for the opposite reason they are sold
- French apps for learners who already take lessons
- Spanish apps for learners who already take lessons
- If you already have a tutor, most language apps are the wrong tool
- Interleaving: why mixing your words beats blocking them
- The 20-minute rule: why cramming before a lesson backfires
- Comprehensible input vs. flashcards: do you need both?
- How to grade yourself honestly on a flashcard
- Cognates and false friends: your unfair head start
- Speaking anxiety: getting through your first tutor sessions
- Learning plateaus: why progress stalls and how to push through
Blog: memory science
- The 90% retention target is an artifact of the objective
- Study abroad has never had a randomised trial
- The evidence says translate. Your teacher says don't
- Why you forget words after a language lesson
- The input hypothesis still cannot be tested
- Every FSRS parameter, w0 to w20, in plain English
- "8,000 words" means 8,000 word families
- The 66-day habit number is a median of 39 people
- Ebbinghaus never said you forget 90% in a week
- Interleaving has a negative effect size on words
- Why you cannot speak after 900 days of Duolingo
- The age 17.4 finding does not mean what you were told
- When you are actually ready for your first novel
- Is it too late to learn a language at 40?
- Why you know the word in the app and not at the restaurant
- The production effect: why saying it out loud beats reading it
- FSRS vs SM-2: how spaced repetition schedulers differ
- Do bilingual brains age slower? What 86,149 people showed
- The pretesting effect: why guessing before you learn works
- The testing effect: why recalling a word beats rereading it
- Sleep and memory: why your vocab consolidates overnight
- Dual coding: why images make vocabulary stick
- The word-frequency curve: why 650 words does so much
- Why your brain forgets Tuesday's vocab by Friday
- Desirable difficulty: why the struggle is the point
- Sound before spelling: why native audio matters
Blog: learner stories
Blog: product
- How much is Super Duolingo? Nobody can tell you, including Duolingo
- How to record a language lesson
- Day 28, 192 cards, and the day the queue peaks
- One research team tested 10 rival language apps
- Is Anki worth it? A straight answer for Spanish and French
- Verbamor iPhone requirements and storage
- Anki alternatives on iOS, honestly compared
- Cloze deletion flashcards with audio
- Picking between the monthly and annual plan
- How to remember words from a conversation
- How FSRS schedules your reviews (under the hood)
Blog: company
- The dementia claim we could market, and will not
- Duolingo's 10-K defines the numbers blogs get wrong