How to Use Vocabulary Mode: Mark Words as Known or Unfamiliar, and Let the Forgetting Curve Schedule Your Reviews
The most frustrating part of memorizing vocabulary is the endless cycle of "learning a word only to forget it." You memorize twenty words today, and when you look at them again in a few days, only a few are left in your memory. What's even more troublesome is that even if you want to review, it's hard to know which words to review and when to review them—re-memorizing everything is too exhausting, while picking at random risks missing the ones you are actually about to forget.
Loopy's Vocabulary Mode is designed to solve exactly this problem. All you need to do is a very simple action: mark the words in the lesson as "Known" or "Unfamiliar," and leave the rest of the scheduling to the system.
Why "Marking Words as Known or Unfamiliar" Is Enough
Human memory follows a curve: after learning something, it gradually fades, but every time you review it right when you are about to forget it, the word will be remembered longer and fade more slowly. Therefore, the real key to reviewing is timing—bringing the word back right at the moment you are about to forget it yields the best results; blindly cramming repetitions is highly inefficient.
The problem is, the speed at which you forget each word is different. That's why the system needs a signal from you: Do I know this word, or is it still unfamiliar?
- Mark "Known": The system pushes the next review for this word further back, so it won't reappear until much later.
- Mark "Unfamiliar": The system schedules it very soon, bringing it back to you in a short while.
Your only job is to mark them honestly; the spaced repetition memory curve will calculate "when it should reappear" for you.
How to Practice in Loopy: Vocabulary Mode
For every lesson, Loopy automatically organizes the key vocabulary into a deck of flashcards. After you finish studying a lesson, just open Vocabulary Mode to start marking words and clearing your reviews.
The three steps to operate:
- Mark unfamiliar words after finishing a lesson: Open Vocabulary Mode in the course and go through the cards one by one. If you remember a word, mark it as "Known"; if you're not sure, mark it as "Unfamiliar." The first round is just about separating the known from the unfamiliar.
- Click cards for details: If you're unsure about a word, click to open the card. A vocabulary practice window will pop up, showing the definition, example sentences, and pronunciation. Listen to it, see how it's used in the example sentence, and then decide whether to mark it as known or unfamiliar.
- Clear them when they are due: The system will then schedule reviews based on your marks. Due words will surface, and all you need to do is come back and clear the due ones—review them and mark them again. Clearing a round every day with a set number of words is enough; there is no need to rememorize the entire lesson.
The key point is: you do not need to remember on which day to review which word yourself. Just open Vocabulary Mode—the due words will be waiting for you there, and once you clear them, you are done.
Summary
Vocabulary Mode transforms learning words from "brute-forcing it with willpower" into "following a to-do list of due reviews." What you need to do is simple: mark words as known or unfamiliar after a lesson, click open cards to see definitions, example sentences, and pronunciation when unsure, and then come back to clear them when they are due. Difficult words will appear more frequently, while well-memorized words will gradually fade out—naturally directing your time to the words that need it most.
Pick a lesson you've just finished, open Vocabulary Mode, and start marking your vocabulary words.