Release 2.5
It’s easy to build up a long list of saved words and still have no idea what to practice next. A card can tell you whether you recognize something, but it can’t always tell you whether that phrase is ready to come out when you need it. For 2.5, we put most of our attention into Review: making it a place to find useful language, come back to it on purpose, and then say it out loud.
You can now explore Essential Words decks alongside your own saved cards and decks. Each one is organized into smaller lessons, so you can work through a useful set of phrases without turning Review into one enormous vocabulary drawer. We’ll keep adding to these decks over time, and future releases will organize them around proficiency so the language you see is better matched to where you are—not just a giant list handed to everyone at once.
We also made an important distinction: looking at a card and practicing it are different activities. Review is now just that—a quick way to reveal and revisit a word. Speaking Drills are where you retrieve it from memory and say it yourself. You can save an entire lesson, a deck, or the handful of phrases you keep needing, then use a drill when you’re ready to move from “I know this” to “I can use this.”
Underneath all of that, Orali now tracks every word and phrase you practice across your learning path, not only the cards you chose to save. If you work on a phrase in a speaking drill, Orali remembers it. If you later see it in an Essential Words lesson or save it to your own deck, that progress comes with it. Your mastery is tied to the language itself, which is how it should work.
That mastery shows up as a simple score: correct recall builds it, missed recall brings it down, and a new phrase stays marked as new until you have started practicing it. We deliberately keep casual card review out of that score—recognition is useful, but it is not the same as producing language. The goal is not to give you another number to maintain. It’s to give you a more honest picture of the words that are becoming yours.
We also gave the learning path a facelift, so the work you’ve already done and the next place to go are easier to see. Small change on the surface, but we think a clear path makes it easier to keep showing up.
Got feature requests or feedback? Email us.
