Apps

Small tools I built for myself.

Three of them, and they are one loop: read a passage out loud and have it scored, collect the words that did not come through, review those words before you forget them — and learn to write the script by hand while you are at it. Free, no installation, and they work on a phone.

The method is older than the software. I ran it on paper in high school and it worked until the bookkeeping got heavier than the reading. These exist to remove the bookkeeping, which is the only part a computer was ever needed for.

Reading

A passage a day, read aloud and scored.

How it works

Paste a chapter and it is cut into passages of about ninety words, one for each day, never splitting a sentence. Read one aloud into your phone and it comes back transcribed and scored against the text, with every word that did not come through marked on the page.

Anyone who reads a language better than they speak it, and wants the gap to stop being invisible.

Words

The words you missed, back before you forget them.

How it works

A deck built from your own reading rather than a downloaded list. Each word arrives with the definition already attached and comes back on a schedule that gets further apart every time you know it and closer every time you do not.

Anyone who has tried flashcards, found the upkeep heavier than the studying, and stopped.

Script

Devanagari and Nastaliq, traced by hand.

How it works

Eighty-one letters across two alphabets, grouped the way they are actually taught. Trace each one with a finger over an animated guide and get told not whether it looked right, but whether the strokes went in the right order and the right direction.

Anyone who can sound out a script but cannot write it, which is the usual place to get stuck.

What they will not do.

A learning tool that oversells its scoring costs you more than one with no scoring at all, because you spend months trusting a number that has not earned it. So, plainly:

  • Reading

    This measures whether each word came across, not your accent. It is a reading-accuracy score built from a transcript, and it has one blind spot worth knowing: a word you mispronounce consistently, in a way the recogniser has learned to understand anyway, will score as correct. It is good at catching skipped words, abandoned sentences and words mangled past recognition — which is most of what actually stalls a reader.

  • Words

    It schedules; it does not teach. A card whose definition you copied without understanding will come back forever and stay meaningless — the tool can tell you that is happening, and cannot fix it for you.

  • Script

    The reference skeletons are hand-authored and schematic — they teach order and direction, which is what the score measures. For the shape of the letter itself, the page shows the real glyph in its own typeface, and that is what to copy.