Dragon Lingo How Dragon Lingo Works
Learn Welsh efficiently using spaced repetition — a scientifically proven technique that shows you words at increasing intervals, right before you're likely to forget them. Here's exactly how the platform takes you from your first login to fluent recall.
1. Create a Free Account
Sign up in seconds with just a username, email and password. Your progress, streaks, achievements and review schedule are saved to your account, so you can study from your phone, tablet or laptop and always pick up exactly where you left off.
2. Choose Your Level & Pace
Decks are organised into four levels — Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Fluent — covering everything from everyday greetings to soft mutations, conjugated prepositions, and natural conversational Welsh. During sign-up you'll choose how many new words per day you'd like to learn — Relaxed (5), Steady (10), Brisk (20) or Intensive (40). This single setting controls how quickly new vocabulary is introduced, which keeps your future review workload predictable and manageable. You can change it anytime from the Settings page.
3. Study with Flashcards
Before each session starts, you'll be asked whether you want Typed Mode for that session. Choose Normal Mode and each card shows the Welsh word or phrase first — try to recall the English translation, then flip the card to reveal the answer along with an example sentence in context. Choose Typed Mode and every card in the session shows the English meaning first, and you type the Welsh word or phrase from memory, including correct spelling and any mutations.
After answering, rate how well you knew it:
- Again — you didn't know it. The card is moved to the back of your current queue (or repeated immediately if it's the only card left) so you'll see it again before the session ends, and its SM-2 schedule resets to come back the next day.
- Hard — you knew it, but it took effort. The next review comes a little sooner than normal.
- Good — a normal, confident recall. The interval grows steadily.
- Easy — instant recall. The interval grows even faster, so you spend less time on words you've mastered.
4. The Science: How the SM-2 Algorithm Schedules Your Reviews
Dragon Lingo uses SM-2, the spaced-repetition algorithm originally developed for SuperMemo in the late 1980s and later popularised by Anki — widely considered one of the most effective methods for long-term vocabulary retention. Here's what happens behind the scenes every time you review a card:
- Every card you've started has an ease factor (how easy you generally find it, starting at 2.5) and an interval (how many days until it's due again).
- When you rate a card Good or Easy, the interval is multiplied by the ease factor — so a card you find easy might jump from a 1-day interval to a 6-day interval, then to a 16-day interval, then a month, and so on, growing further apart each time.
- Rating a card Easy also nudges its ease factor up slightly, so that card grows its intervals even faster in future — you'll see it less and less as it moves into your long-term memory.
- Rating a card Hard slightly reduces the ease factor and grows the interval more conservatively, so tricky words are reviewed a bit more often.
- Rating a card Again resets its interval back to one day and lowers its ease factor — the card effectively becomes "new" again and becomes due tomorrow.
- Whenever an interval is one day or longer, the due date is set to midnight of the target day rather than the exact time you reviewed it — so a card reviewed at 11pm becomes due as soon as the new day starts, not 24 hours later.
The net effect is a review queue that's always focused on exactly the words you're at risk of forgetting today — no more, no less. Words you find easy quickly fade into occasional refreshers measured in months, while words you find tricky keep reappearing until they stick. This is far more efficient than re-reading a vocabulary list from the top every time, because your study time is concentrated on your weak spots rather than wasted re-confirming things you already know.
5. New Cards vs. Reviews
Each study session blends two types of card: reviews (cards you've seen before that are now due, scheduled by SM-2) and new cards (words you haven't studied yet, introduced at the daily pace you chose at sign-up or set in Settings). Once you've reached your daily new-card limit, a session will only contain reviews — this keeps your workload predictable and stops your review queue from spiralling out of control after a big study session.
6. Build a Daily Streak
Studying a little every day is far more effective for long-term memory than cramming occasionally — this is sometimes called the "spacing effect". Dragon Lingo tracks your current streak (consecutive days you've completed at least one review) and your longest streak ever, both shown on your dashboard, to help keep you motivated and consistent.
7. Unlock Achievements
As you study, you'll automatically unlock achievement badges — for reaching streak milestones (3, 7, 30, 100, even 365 days), learning vocabulary milestones (10 up to 1,500+ words), completing review-count milestones, and finishing entire topic decks. Visit the Achievements page any time to see which badges you've earned and which are still locked.
8. Add Friends & Compete on the Leaderboard
Search for friends by username, send a friend request, and once accepted you'll both appear on each other's leaderboard — ranked by current streak, with longest streak, words learned and total reviews shown alongside. A bit of friendly competition is a great way to stay accountable.
9. Create Your Own Personal Decks
Beyond the built-in topic decks, you can create your own private decks — perfect for vocabulary specific to your job, your family, a holiday, or anything that isn't covered by the standard topics. These decks are visible only to you, but study and SM-2 scheduling work exactly the same way as the built-in decks.
10. Print Cheatsheets & Track Your Progress
Every deck has a one-click "print cheatsheet" option that generates a clean, printable table of all the words, translations, notes and example sentences in that topic — handy for revision away from a screen. Meanwhile, your Progress page shows GitHub-style activity heatmaps of your reviews and new words learned over the last 17 weeks, plus a breakdown of how often you rate cards Again, Hard, Good or Easy, so you can see exactly how your Welsh is improving over time.
11. Extra Practice Modes
Once you've completed a topic, unlock Random Study to revisit its words for fun outside the normal SM-2 schedule, or use Hard Words mode to drill specifically into the cards you've found most difficult (lowest ease factor, or ones you've recently pressed "Again" on).