iOS · On the App Store
Flashwords
Boost your vocabulary in five minutes a day.
Flashwords is a vocabulary-first language app for adults. Short lessons built around real-life topics, everyday phrases and short dialogues, seven kinds of exercises, and words that come back right before you forget them. Seven languages, works offline, no streak shame.
Features
What it does.
19 real-life topics
Cooking, shopping, travel, work, family and more. Each topic is a path of short lessons, level by level, so you always know which lesson comes next.
Words, phrases, then a dialogue
A lesson moves from single words to everyday phrases, then to a short dialogue where you hear them used. Every word and every line has audio.
Seven ways to practice
Pick the meaning, pick the word, listen and choose, spell it, fill the gap, build the sentence, match the pairs. Five minutes never feels like a flashcard pile.
Words you miss come back
The app keeps track of the words you get wrong and brings them back until they stick. A review takes a couple of minutes.
Seven languages, offline
Learn English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Turkish. Lessons work without a connection, on a flight or on the subway.
Calm, not childish
A daily goal you set yourself, a streak that never scolds, and a quiet sloth who shows up when a lesson ends. Built for 25-to-45-year-olds who want momentum without manipulation.
Screens
A look inside.
Why Flashwords exists
Flashwords nearly didn’t survive its third year.
It started in 2018 as a side project — a list of words I needed to memorize while learning English, with a quiz screen bolted on. For two years I shipped updates between full-time jobs, watching the download numbers creep up and the revenue stay near zero. By 2021 I’d half-convinced myself it was a hobby that had outgrown me.
Then a teacher in Spain emailed: “My 14-year-old daughter has been using your app every day for a year. I have no idea how she found it. Thank you.”
I read that email five times.
What kept me going was the realization that the people who’d found Flashwords on their own had found something the big language apps weren’t offering. Not gamification, not grammar trees, not streak shame. Just words you’ll actually use, organized around real life, with spaced repetition that forgets nicely.
So the app stayed narrow. No story mode. No AI conversation partner. Five minutes a day, and whether you do it or skip it, you’ll be fine.
The 2025 redesign was the first time in seven years I let myself rewrite the interface. Warmer palette, calmer onboarding. All of it came out of one observation: the people downloading the app aren’t 18 anymore. The original audience grew up. So did the design.
In 2026 I rebuilt every screen again. The home screen now shows one thing: your next lesson. Topics became paths you walk level by level, and lessons end in a short dialogue, so the words arrive in a sentence someone would actually say. The app also got a mascot, which I’d sworn it never would: a sloth that appears when a lesson ends, never while you’re deciding whether to practice.
What hasn’t changed: nobody on the screen is yelling at you to come back.
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