Vokabulo Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. What makes Vokabulo unique?

   Most language apps teach everyone the same words, and that works up to about B1. After that, the vocabulary you need comes from your own life: your job, your neighbours, the books you read. Vokabulo is built for that stage.

   • Scenes: describe a situation you are about to walk into (a rental viewing, a client presentation, a doctor's visit) and get the words and example sentences for exactly that, matched to your level.
   • Your own words, done for you: type or dictate any word or phrase and Vokabulo adds the translation, a natural example sentence, the article for nouns and a usage label, so you know whether you can say it to a friend or put it in an email.
   • Real retention: FSRS spaced repetition brings each word back just before you would forget it.
   • 100+ languages in any pair, on iPhone, iPad and in the browser with one account.

2. Why should a person choose Vokabulo over its competitors?

   Choose Vokabulo if you can already get by in a language and want to say exactly what you mean.

   • Compared with Duolingo or Babbel: those courses teach the foundations everyone needs. Vokabulo starts where they stop and works with the words of your own life.
   • Compared with Anki or Quizlet: you get the same spaced repetition, but you don't build cards by hand. Vokabulo writes the translation and a natural example sentence for every word, and Scenes and Sets give you ready vocabulary for real situations.
   • Compared with asking ChatGPT: a chat gives you a list once. Vokabulo keeps the words, brings them back until you remember them, and shows you how you're progressing.

   It is free to start with no card and no trial that runs out.

3. What's the story behind Vokabulo?

   Vokabulo was started by Wolfgang Männel in Bad Soden near Frankfurt. He has lived and worked abroad several times, including as a student in Paris and later in London, and kept running into the same problem: the grammar was fine, but in the moments that mattered the right word wasn't there. No course could teach those words, because they came from his own life.

   Vokabulo is the app he wishes he had had back then. It is built by Tathros GmbH in Germany and has been available on iPhone, iPad and in the browser since 2026.

4. Which are the primary technologies used for building Vokabulo?

   • A native app for iPhone and iPad, plus a web app that runs in any current browser
   • Convex as the backend database with real-time sync between devices
   • Clerk for sign-in (Apple, Google or a one-time email code)
   • Large language models from several providers for translations, example sentences and Scenes
   • FSRS, the modern open spaced-repetition algorithm, for scheduling reviews
   • Google Cloud Text-to-Speech for pronunciation
   • RevenueCat and Stripe for subscriptions, Cloudflare for hosting

5. How would you describe the primary audience of Vokabulo?

   Adults who are past the basics in a foreign language (roughly B1 and above) and whose everyday life happens in it:

   • Expats and people working abroad who deal with landlords, doctors, offices and colleagues in the local language
   • International students who want to keep up in seminars and the life around them
   • Professionals who work across languages and want the same precision in meetings and emails as in their mother tongue
   • Readers and culture lovers who want to catch the nuance of books, films and conversations in the original

   For companies and relocation agencies there is an offer to give their people Pro alongside language courses.