August 7, 2026
Every word you learn now sticks around
The biggest update since launch: Lingo now keeps every word you learn, brings it back at exactly the right moment, and notices when you practice on your own.
Remember when I said the debrief was quietly becoming the foundation for something bigger? This is the something bigger.
Here's a confession first. Until now, when you finished a call and saw "7 new words", those words got exactly one moment of glory on the debrief screen. Then they faded into the background. You'd have to meet them again by luck. That always bugged me, because using a new word once is not the same as owning it. Owning it means it shows up again, and again, until it comes out of your mouth without thinking.
So we rebuilt how Lingo remembers. Properly. Here's what's new in the app today.
Your own collection of words
Every word you manage to use in a call now lands in your personal collection. Not a generic dictionary entry: your word, with your sentence attached, from the actual conversation where you used it. Open the Learn tab and it's all there, growing call by call. It's honestly a little addictive to scroll through. That's your progress, in your own words. Literally.
Words come back at exactly the right moment
Here's the part I'm most proud of. Your brain forgets on a schedule, and the trick to making things stick is meeting a word again right before it slips away. The world's best memory tools are built on that timing. Lingo now does the same thing, with one big difference: in your conversations there are no drills and no "time to review!" guilt trips. The words just show up naturally in your next calls, right when they matter most.
Say you learned the word for "to order" during a chat about restaurants last week. A few calls later:
That's not a coincidence. That's Lingo, on schedule. (In the app this happens in your target language, of course. There's your word, back again, right on time.)
You won't see the machinery. You'll just notice that words you were about to forget keep coming up, and that at some point they stop feeling like new words at all. That's the plan working.
Lingo notices when you practice
The Learn tab isn't just a glossary. If you enjoy flipping through your words the classic card-by-card way, it's all there, built from your own sentences. And here's the fun part: when you review, Lingo knows about it in your next call. Expect something like "I saw you worked on your words yesterday, want to try them out loud?" Practice on the couch, prove it in conversation. The two finally talk to each other.
And the debrief got smarter too
The debrief now tells you two different stories: the genuinely new words you picked up this call, and the words from your collection you used again. That second list is my favorite thing in the whole update. It's proof, in black and white, that things are sticking.
No new buttons to learn, nothing to set up. Just call Lingo like you always do, and the words will take care of themselves.
One more thing, fixed
A few of you had calls cut out when your phone's screen locked mid-conversation. That's fixed in this update too: your screen now stays awake for the whole call, so Lingo won't hang up on you mid-sentence again. Sorry about that one.
Go collect some words.
Jakob