Esatto

One Italian sentence at a time, with one word missing and the English translation underneath. The first time a word comes up, you pick it from four. Every time after that, you type it. When you get it right, the iPhone’s Italian voice reads the whole sentence and the card says Esatto, which is what an Italian says when you have something exactly right. When you miss a word you are typing, or tap Teach me, the word appears in faint letters for you to type over, and it comes back a few cards later.

The words come most common first, by how often they turn up in Italian film and TV subtitles. The sentences come from Tatoeba, an open collection that volunteers write and translate. A scheduler (FSRS, the open algorithm that Anki offers) decides when each word comes back: soon after a miss, then at longer gaps each time you get it right. The start screen shows how far you are through the 10,000 words, and there is no level to pick.

The known-word list

Every answer adds to a list of the Italian words you know. Picking a word out of four shows that you recognize it, so it counts as seen. It counts as known only when you type it with no mistakes at a review 21 days or more after the last one, because by then you are producing it from memory. The count sits in the top corner while you play, and Settings exports the list as a file you can take to whatever you read next.

For people who already study Italian, in an app or a class, and want to add words every day. It also suits heritage speakers who understand more Italian than they can produce. It teaches vocabulary only: there is no grammar and no speaking practice. Every instruction is in Italian with the English underneath.