Spanish Vocabulary & Listening

You know the word. You still miss it when someone says it at normal speed.

notaps Words plays Spanish aloud — the word, then a real sentence using it — until hearing it stops being work. No tapping, no streak to defend, no account.

■ Hands-free listening is the whole point

Open the app and words start playing. Put the phone in your pocket on the commute, leave it running while you cook, keep it going in bed. Look at the screen when you can, listen when you can't. Set the sleep timer and it stops on its own if you fall asleep.

■ 11,677 words, graded from easy

15,904 cards, every one with an example sentence. Everyday speech, travel, work, idioms, and a university-level tier when you want it. You always know where you are because the levels climb in order.

■ 20 languages, any pair

Spanish, English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Turkish, Polish, Dutch and Ukrainian. Pick the language you are learning and the language you want the meaning in — any combination works.

■ Say it after the model voice

Listen, then say it into the microphone and get scored on the spot. Miss it and the model slows down, step by step, until you can hear every sound — then you try again. The part of learning that is awkward in front of other people, done alone.

■ Portrait for the word, landscape for the sentence

Turn the phone sideways and the word becomes a sentence that uses it. Words that are slippery on their own tend to land once they sit in context. Dictation goes the other way: hear it, type it, and the sounds you thought you caught show up as spelling that drifts.

■ It comes back before you lose it

Words you have seen return at widening intervals. On Monday you get last week's minutes and word count, plus a check on which words are fading. The ones quietly slipping away get picked back up before they go.

■ Add your own

Save words as they come up, or point the camera at a page or a screen and let it read the text for you. Your own list studies exactly like the built-in levels.

■ Sixty seconds at the start, one quiz the next morning

The first run asks eight questions and estimates roughly where your vocabulary sits, so you don't start somewhere boring or somewhere impossible. The next morning a short quiz arrives built from what you heard the day before. Home Screen, Lock Screen and StandBy widgets are included.

■ Works offline

The words, the sentences and the audio are on the device. Underground, on a plane, on a metered connection — same app. No sign-in. Nothing about your studying leaves the phone.

■ This is for you if

・you want the language back but have no desk time

・you keep the vocabulary you have and want to stop losing it

・you'd rather touch the language while moving than sit and drill

・you want repetition without a streak nagging you

■ One payment

Free to start. Study a set number of words for free, then one purchase unlocks every level and unlimited pronunciation practice, permanently. Not a subscription. No ads. It is not a grammar course, so if you want grammar built up from zero, this is not that app.

notaps is built around learning that nobody watches. Fewer taps, and the gaps in your day turn into the language.