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.
Plenty of couples never do, and that is a real choice rather than a failure. If the two of you share a language that works, the relationship itself does not need a second one.
The reason people give when they do start is almost never the relationship. It is everyone around it: parents who do not share the working language, a joke at the table that has to be explained afterwards, a form at the doctor, a child who will grow up hearing both. If several of those are in your life, the question is less whether to learn it and more how to keep the words you are already meeting.
So start from that rather than from a course. You do not need a plan for the whole language, only for the part your partner's family actually uses, which is smaller and stranger than any textbook.
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.
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.
For that there is the MindDory keyboard for iPhone and Android. You write the reply in the family group chat or the message to their sister in the app you already use, and the keyboard checks it before you send it.
Tap the MindDory button above the keys and the sentence is checked, with the correction next to what you wrote and a short reason for each fix. Nothing in your text changes until you choose to use it. Say it fluently shows the same sentence the way someone who grew up with the language would write it. Turn on Learn from my writing and your mistakes are kept by topic and CEFR level, so you can see which grammar keeps catching you.
It checks nine languages: English, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish. Checks share one allowance across the keyboard, Chrome and the web app: a monthly allowance on the free plan and up to 200 a day with Premium. The details are on the grammar keyboard page.
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.
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.
Because the person who built it needed it. Hynek, the founder, moved to Asia two years ago, met his girlfriend in English and once answered her one minute voice message with "hahaha interesting" because he understood a few words of it. He wrote about what that taught him, and why he stopped relearning what he already knew.
That is a decision about your own life, not a trade. Usually the person who spends more time inside the other family, or who lives in the other country, is the one who meets the language more, and the effort tends to follow the exposure rather than any idea of fairness. If you are the one at their parents' table, learning makes those evenings yours. If neither of you is ever around the other family, there may be no reason for either of you to learn, and that is fine too.
Mostly. Flashcards, the review schedule and the AI assistant connection work in more than 60 languages. Two things do not. Photographing text into cards is built for six languages, English, Spanish, French, German, Czech and Italian, and refuses anything else outright. And the ready-made CEFR word list, the Word Map and the level test go deep in eight languages in the app, which is three more than this site itself lists. Outside those eight you would be building from words you meet rather than starting from a list.
A review session is short by design, and there is nothing that rewards you for staying longer. The honest limit is not the reviewing, it is the saving: if you do not capture words in the moment you meet them, there is nothing to review. That is why photographing text and the AI assistant connection exist, and why typing a word by hand is the slowest of the three paths.
The core is free forever: unlimited flashcards, folders and languages, spaced repetition, the Word Map, three AI stories, three Memory Cues (one from 20 November 2026), one scan and 30 smart translations every day. Premium lifts the daily caps on stories, Memory Cues and translations, adds PDF uploads and up to 200 photo scans a month, pronunciation on your cards and the full Word Map. Connecting an AI assistant is not part of that: MCP Brain is free with any account. It is $49.99 per year, and the annual plan includes a 7-day free trial, or $9.99 per month. Cancel any time from Settings.