Paroletta

One Italian word a day. If you have played a five-letter daily word game you already know the grid: six tries, green for a letter in the right place, grey for one that is not in the word at all. The hints arrive in a fixed ladder, a gloss first, then the word blanked out of a real sentence, then a single letter, and each one you take is recorded against your score. At the end there is a written question, la domanda, for anyone who wants to use the word rather than just find it.

It is built this way because every typed guess is evidence. A right guess says you can produce the word. A wrong guess is worth more, because it names a word you can produce, a word you were reaching for, and the distance between them, all in one keystroke. Paroletta, Salotto and Filotto all work like this. They measure what you know while you play, and then spend that knowledge on making the next thing you read the right difficulty. Nothing here is a test anyone signed up for.

Two more games, built and waiting

Categorie gives you sixteen Italian words that sort into four groups, and the groupings you try and abandon say as much about your vocabulary as the ones you get. Vocabolario is about a hundred quick calls of real word or invented word, and three minutes later you have a rough count of how many Italian words you know. Both are finished and currently dark. They launch on all three platforms at once, which is why they are waiting on the Google Play review rather than shipping to two platforms now.

For people who have some Italian already and want to keep it warm. Each day's word carries a CEFR level, the example sentences are real Italian rather than graded, and there is no course and no grammar tab. If you have never studied the language, this will be a wall rather than a warm-up.