You are fine at home and lost at their family table.

MindDory is a vocabulary app for people whose partner speaks another language. You save the words you meet in real life, in their messages, in a film they grew up with, at dinner with their parents, and MindDory brings each one back until it stays. It is built for the vocabulary your own life produced, which is exactly the vocabulary no course contains.

Why does the language stop growing after the first year?

Because it works. You reach the point where the two of you understand each other, and from there every conversation you have is made of the words you already share. The shared language stops being a thing you are learning and becomes a thing you are using, and using it does not extend it.

What exposes the gap is anyone who is not your partner. Their mother talks faster and does not simplify. Their friends use the slang the two of you never needed. A family argument about something ordinary turns out to require thirty words you have never once had a reason to say. None of that is a sign you learned badly; it is a sign you learned exactly what your life asked for.

The vocabulary that closes it is not on a syllabus, because it is specific to their family, their region and the things they happen to talk about. It only exists in the moments you meet it, and those moments are usually the ones where you cannot stop and write anything down.

What do you do with a word you heard at dinner?

Get it in fast and sort it out later. You can photograph text, a label, a recipe card, a subtitle, a message on a screen, and MindDory pulls candidate words out of it. How well it picks depends on the language: English is fully built, and in the other five it reads (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Czech) it offers words it cannot judge rather than dropping them, so you untick more. You can also connect Claude, Cursor or another MCP client, so a word you asked it about becomes a card without a second step.

For a word you only heard, type it as you think it sounded and fix it afterwards. A misspelled card you review is worth more than a perfect one you never made, and the entire failure mode here is the note you meant to write on the way home.

None of this asks anything of your partner. That matters more than it sounds: turning the person you live with into a vocabulary source is a reliable way to make both of you dread the subject.

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

You say whether it was hard or easy. A hard word comes back in three days, an easy one in a week, and the second time you call it easy it stops asking. There is nothing else to set.

That design is doing something specific for this situation. The words you are collecting arrive in bursts, a weekend with their family produces forty and the following fortnight produces none, and a system that needs a daily habit to work would have already failed by the second quiet week. This one only needs you to open it when a card is due.

Can you start before you have collected anything?

Yes, and for most people it is the better first month. Take the CEFR level test, which takes a couple of minutes and gives you a real A1 to C2 level, and then work the vocabulary list for the level below the one you tested at. That fills in the ordinary words your particular life skipped, which is usually a stranger set than people expect.

Two different numbers, and the difference decides where you should start. The level test and the vocabulary lists on this site cover five languages: English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. Inside the app the level test and the Word Map cover eight, adding Czech, Portuguese and Indonesian. So if your partner speaks Czech, the test linked at the top of this page will not have it and the one in the app will. Beyond those eight you can still learn in more than 60 languages, with your own language used for translations and definitions, but you would be building from words you meet rather than starting from a list.

One honest note: the MindDory interface is currently in English. Translations, definitions and study content work in your language, the buttons do not.

What this is not

• Not a course, and not a substitute for talking to them. It holds on to what those conversations already gave you.
• Not a translator to open mid-argument. It translates words you save, on your own time.
• Not a streak game. Nothing punishes you for the fortnight where you collected nothing.
• Not something your partner has to participate in. It is designed so that they never have to be your teacher.
• 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. One upload reads about a page or two, not a book.

Frequently asked questions