You moved. The language is everywhere and none of it sticks.

MindDory is a vocabulary app for people who moved to another country and now need the language around them every day. You photograph a form, a sign, a letter from the council, and the words you do not know become flashcards that come back on a schedule until they stay. It is built for words you actually met, not for a syllabus.

Why does living in the language not teach you the language?

Because immersion gives you volume, not repetition. You meet a word once, on a form or in a queue, understand it from context or from the person pointing, and then do not meet it again for three weeks. By then it is gone. That is not a failure of attention, it is how memory works: a single encounter with a word you half-guessed leaves almost nothing behind.

The gap is specific and it is not about effort. People who have lived somewhere for two years often speak fluently about the four topics their life repeats and freeze on the fifth. The vocabulary you have is the vocabulary your week happens to contain, and everything outside it stays permanently new.

What closes that gap is meeting the word again, deliberately, a few days after the first time. That is the only part of this MindDory does. It does not teach you the language; the country is already doing that. It keeps what the country gave you.

What do you do with a word you met on a sign?

Photograph it. Point the camera at the letter, the menu, the notice on the door, the screen of a government portal, and MindDory pulls out the words you do not know and turns them into flashcards. No typing, which matters, because the moment you would have typed it is the moment you were standing in a queue.

Two limits worth knowing before you count on this, because together they decide whether the section above applies to you at all. Photographing text into cards is built for six languages, English, Spanish, French, German, Czech and Italian; a page in anything else is refused outright, and you would be typing words in by hand.

And of those six, English is the one that is fully built. MindDory knows a CEFR level for most of its English dictionary, so it can set aside the words far below your level. In the other five it recognises fewer words, and a word it cannot judge is offered rather than dropped, so you get a longer list to untick rather than a shorter one. Czech is the thinnest of them: expect prepositions and the occasional thing the camera misread in among the words you actually wanted.

If the word came out of a conversation rather than off a page, you can connect MindDory to Claude, Cursor or another MCP client, and the words you use when you ask it something become cards on their own.

The point of both paths is the same: the distance between meeting a word and saving it has to be near zero, or you will not do it. Anything that takes a notebook and a free evening loses to the evening.

How does it decide when to show you a word again?

You say whether the word was hard or easy, and nothing else. A hard word comes back in three days. An easy one comes back in a week. The second time you call it easy, it stops asking. That is the entire configuration, and there is nothing to tune.

This matters more when you have moved than when you are studying, because your time is not the problem your life has. Nobody who is also finding a doctor, a school and a bank wants to build a deck and choose an interval. The card either arrives or it does not.

Which languages does it go deep in?

Three different answers, and the difference matters when you have moved. Flashcards and the review schedule work in more than 60 languages, with your own language used for translations and definitions. The Word Map and the in-app level test go deep in eight: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Czech, Portuguese and Indonesian. Photographing text into cards works in six of those, all but Portuguese and Indonesian.

The vocabulary lists on this site cover five: English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. If you moved somewhere one of those covers, starting from the A1 or A2 list is usually a faster first week than starting from your own camera roll, because those levels are close to the vocabulary of daily errands.

One honest note, because this page is read by people who are surrounded by things not in their language: the MindDory interface itself is currently in English. Translations, definitions and study content work in your language, but the buttons do not yet.

What this is not

• Not a course. There are no lessons, no levels to unlock, and nobody explains the grammar to you.
• Not a translator. It will translate a word you save, but it is not the app you open mid-conversation to get through a sentence.
• Not a streak game. There is no mascot, no guilt, and closing the app on a bad day costs you nothing.
• Not a substitute for speaking to people. It only holds on to the words that speaking to people gave you.
• Not a scanner for every language, and not equally good across the six it does read. English is fully built; the other five offer words they cannot judge rather than dropping them, so the list you untick is longer. One upload reads about a page or two, not a whole book.

Frequently asked questions