Ordvana app icon

Ordvana

You type in the words you have to learn, for school or for a language you are picking up, and Ordvana quizzes you on them until they stay put.

Get it on Google Play Download on the App Store

Free. Available in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, in English and Swedish.

Ordvana's home screen: a start button, today's challenge, the weekly review and three word pages

A page for every word list

A word list gets a page of its own, with the words on the left and their meanings on the right, in whichever two languages the list happens to be in; any word can also carry a short note underneath for the things a plain translation doesn't cover. That is all the setup there is.

The word page for a Spanish travel list, with Spanish words on the left, English meanings on the right and notes under two of them

Three ways to practise

Each quiz starts by asking which. In Match the words sit on one side and the shuffled meanings on the other, and you tap them together, green when the pair is right, a buzz and a flash of red when it isn't. Write means typing the meaning yourself; a small slip in the spelling still counts, but the right spelling is shown before the next word so the mistake doesn't settle in. Multiple choice gives four alternatives to pick from, which is the gentler option for words seen for the first time a few minutes earlier.

Whichever one is running, a word answered wrong is not gone. It turns up again later in the same round, and again after that, until it has been answered correctly, and there is deliberately no setting to switch that off.

A Match round: Spanish words on the left, English meanings on the right, two pairs already matched in green

It leans towards the words you miss

Ordvana pays attention to which words are new and which ones keep getting missed, so a session leans towards those rather than twenty picked at random. Starred words can be drilled on their own. On the home screen there is a daily challenge of seven words chosen for the day, plus a weekly review that collects whatever has been going wrong that week and goes away once those words have been cleared.

There is a streak for the days practised and a progress screen covering the last seven, and reminders can go daily, every third day or weekly, or not at all. A tap on the speaker reads any word aloud in its own language.

The progress screen: eleven days in a row, a bar for each of the last seven days and counts of the words learned

Your words stay on your phone

Ordvana works entirely offline. Your word lists are stored on the phone and nowhere else, unless you export them yourself: a full backup can be saved as a file to a folder of your choice or shared, and a single list can be sent to a classmate, who imports it straight into their own pages. Lists come in the other way too, from a notes app or from CSV and TSV files, with a parser forgiving enough that most pasted formats simply work.

There are no ads in Ordvana, no account to create and nothing to subscribe to. The app collects nothing and sends nothing anywhere, because there is no server for it to go to.

Ordvana's home screen in the dark theme

Get Ordvana

Free on Google Play and the App Store, with no subscription and no in-app purchases. It is available in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

Get it on Google Play Download on the App Store