Practising English vocabulary in conversation, not flashcards: which apps actually do it

Recognising a word and producing it are two different abilities that feel like one. You read *reluctant* and the meaning arrives instantly, so it feels learnt. Then someone asks you why you did not take the job and what comes out is "I didn't want so much", because producing a word means retrieving it in under a second while a person waits, and that is a skill your flashcards never asked you for.

This is why the pile grows and the speaking does not. A thousand recognised words and two hundred usable ones is the normal ratio for someone who has studied for years, and no amount of extra reviewing moves a word from the first group to the second. Only using it does.

A word is learnt the first time you need it, cannot find it, find it a beat late, and say it anyway. That moment is uncomfortable and it is the entire mechanism. Everything below is arranged around producing more of those moments.

Talk for ten or fifteen minutes about something you actually want to say. Not a word list, a subject. The words you need will make themselves obvious by being missing.

Save three to five words from that conversation. The ones you reached for and did not have, or the ones you used clumsily. Three is enough; the temptation is to save twenty and use none.

Write the pattern, not the definition. Not *reluctant = unwilling* but *be reluctant to do something*, with one sentence you would actually say. A definition tells you what a word means; a pattern tells you where it goes.

Use those three in the next conversation, deliberately. This is the step that does the work and the step everyone skips. Having the words in front of you while you talk makes it possible; relying on memory to surface them mid-sentence does not.

Let the ones that stuck fall away and keep the ones that did not. Spaced repetition is good at deciding what to show you again. What it cannot do is make you say it to someone.

Anki is the best spaced-repetition engine there is, it is free on everything except iOS, and if your problem is forgetting words you once knew it will solve that completely. Quizlet is faster to start with because the sets already exist, and Memrise wraps the same idea in short native-speaker clips. Vocabulary.com is better than all of them at teaching what a word actually means rather than its nearest translation.

All four stop at the same place. The card ends and the word goes back in the box. None of them can put you in a situation where you need that word in the next four seconds, which is the only situation that turns recognition into production.

That is not a criticism of the tools, it is a description of what they are for. The mistake is expecting a review system to do a production job, and then concluding you are bad at vocabulary when the words do not arrive.

It has to let you save words from your own conversations, not just study a set. The words worth learning are the ones you personally reached for and missed, and no pre-built list knows what those are.

It has to put those words somewhere you can see them while you are speaking. A list you review afterwards is a flashcard with extra steps. A list sitting beside you during the conversation is a prompt, and a prompt is what makes you use the word today instead of recognising it again next month.

It has to notice when you get it wrong and bring it back. One correction changes nothing. The same correction on Tuesday, Thursday and the following week is what changes the habit — and that means the app has to remember across sessions, which most do not.

It should cover the awkward categories too. Phrasal verbs and idioms are where learners sound most obviously foreign, and they are exactly the items that resist flashcards, because *put up with* is not a word with a meaning, it is a pattern with a situation.

Every figure in the table was read on each app’s own pricing page on the date above. Prices and free tiers move; this table is re-checked and re-dated when they do. Quizlet, Memrise and Vocabulary.com are described above rather than priced in the table, because their pricing pages do not publish a figure that can be read without an account.