Spaced Repetition for Vocabulary: A Practical Guide

You look up a word, understand it, and forget it by tomorrow. This isn't a memory problem. It's a timing problem.

Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the "forgetting curve" in 1885. Without review, you lose roughly 70% of new information within 24 hours. But if you review at the right intervals — just before you're about to forget — the memory gets stronger each time.

This is spaced repetition. Instead of reviewing everything every day, you review each item at increasing intervals: 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, and so on. Items you find easy get pushed further out. Items you struggle with come back sooner.

Anki popularized this approach, and it works incredibly well. But most language learners use Anki wrong. They create flashcards from word lists, divorced from any context. You end up memorizing translations without actually knowing how to use the words.

The better approach: learn words from reading, then reinforce them with spaced repetition. When you encounter a word in a text, you understand it in context. You know the sentence it appeared in, the topic it relates to, the feeling of the paragraph. That context makes the memory richer and stickier.

In Newt AI, this is built into the flow. You read a text, tap words you don't know, and they automatically enter your review queue. When you review them later, you're not just seeing a word and a translation — you're recalling the context you first encountered it in.

The combination of reading for acquisition and spaced repetition for retention is probably the most efficient way to build vocabulary that actually sticks.