Add Your Own Words

Every language app on earth ships with the same starter deck. You learn the colors, the numbers, the days of the week, the word for "apple," and the word for "library." Fine. But two weeks into a trip to Mumbai, you discover that the words you actually need are "gate number," "extra pillow," "vegetarian thali," and "how do I get to this address," and none of those were in the starter deck — nor should they have been.

Word Exchange Plaza's custom words feature exists because generic decks can only take you so far. Somewhere around week three, the language you need stops being the language in a textbook and starts being the language of your life: your neighborhood, your job, your partner's family, your travel itinerary. The plaza lets you add all of that and drill it the same way you drill the rest.

Why Custom Vocabulary Matters

There are two stages to language learning. Stage one: you learn the high-frequency vocabulary that appears in any beginner course. Stage two: you learn the specific vocabulary that matters to you. Most apps handle stage one and then silently abandon you.

Stage two is where fluency actually happens. It's the difference between knowing "restaurant" and knowing how to order the specific dish you want at the specific restaurant you're going to tonight. It's the difference between knowing "work" and knowing the ten technical words your job requires every day. The generic deck will never guess those for you. You have to add them.

Frequency vs. Relevance: Why Your Dictionary Doesn't Match Your Life

Linguists have known for almost a century that word frequency in any language follows a steep, predictable curve. The most-frequent word in English ("the") accounts for around 7% of all written words. The second-most-frequent ("of") accounts for 3.5%. By word number 1,000 you are looking at fractions of a percent each. This pattern is called Zipf's law and it holds across essentially every natural language ever measured^[1].

Beginner courses are built around the top of that curve — the high-frequency core that gets you about 80% of any conversation. That's the right place to start. The problem is that the long tail beyond the top 1,000 — the place where "MRI scan," "vegetarian thali," "extra pillow," and "my daughter is allergic to peanuts" all live — is where your specific life happens. The vocabulary that matters most to you personally is almost guaranteed to be outside the curve any general course can predict. The New General Service List of high-frequency English words contains 2,800 lemmas; an English-speaking nurse, on her shift, will use roughly half of them and another 400 that nobody outside her field will ever need^[2].

The custom words feature is a way of admitting this honestly. Once the high-frequency core is in your head, the highest-leverage thing you can do is add the specific 50–200 words that show up in your week and drill those. The plaza will not pretend to know what they are — only you do.

What You Can Add

The custom words feature is deliberately flexible. You can add:

• Single words. The ten nouns from last week's Spanish class that you keep forgetting. Drop them in.
• Phrases. "Can I have a window seat, please." "Where is the nearest pharmacy." "My daughter is allergic to peanuts." These are the sentences that make or break travel, and you can train them the same way you train single words.
• Whole sentences. Speeches, introductions, toasts, scripted answers you know you'll have to give at a specific event. Add them, drill them, arrive prepared.
• Domain vocabulary. Medical terms, legal terms, engineering terms, cooking terms — whatever your actual life demands.

Each entry becomes part of the same practice engine as the built-in course. That means your custom words get the same hands-free voice drilling, the same reaction-time tracking, the same spaced return of words you stumbled on, and the same place in the mastery curve. They're first-class citizens, not a side feature.

How to Add a Word

The flow is short on purpose:

1. Open the custom words panel inside the plaza.
2. Type the word or phrase in your target language and its English meaning.
3. The plaza generates audio so you can hear a native pronunciation.
4. The new item enters your personal pool and starts appearing in your next round.

That's it. No import wizards. No tagging ceremony. Add the word, drill the word, move on. If you later decide you don't need it, remove it and it stops appearing.

Custom Words Flow Through Every Other Mode

Here's the part nobody expects: your custom vocabulary doesn't live in a silo. Once you add a word, it becomes available to every other mode in the plaza.

• It shows up in hands-free drills alongside the built-in course items.
• It can appear in MadLibs story templates that need a word of the right type.
• It gets folded into the song generator once you've drilled it enough times to count as "learned."
• Your custom vocabulary shows up inside 1v1 challenges and contributes to your leaderboard points the same way built-in words do.

One word added, five modes of practice reinforcing it. That's a much stronger training loop than a flashcard app that isolates each word in its own silo.

Use Cases: When Custom Words Earn Their Keep

• Trip prep. Two weeks before a trip, add the phrases you know you'll need. Airport, taxi, hotel, restaurant, emergency. Drill hands-free on the walk to work.
• New job. If you work with native speakers of your target language, add the ten words you hear the most but can't produce yet. The plaza will drill you until you can.
• Family. If your partner's family speaks another language, add the conversational phrases you want to walk in with. "Happy birthday," "the food is delicious," "can I help with the dishes." Preparing in advance is a gift.
• A specific book, show, or song. Watching something in your target language and keep hearing the same word? Add it. Next time it comes up, you'll know it.

A Practical Framework: Building Your First 50

The hardest part of using custom words is starting. People sit down to add their first ten and freeze, because language doesn't come with a syllabus when it's your language. Here is the framework that has worked for the alpha players who got the most out of the feature.

Spend a single ordinary day paying attention. A weekday is best. Carry a paper notebook or a notes app and write down every concept you would have wanted to say in your target language but couldn't — not the full sentence, just the noun, verb, or phrase. "Dishwasher." "I forgot my umbrella." "Sleeping in." "Tax deadline." By the end of the day you will have somewhere between fifteen and forty entries. Most of them will surprise you, because they are not the words a textbook ever guesses you'll need.

Sort the list into three buckets. Daily-life nouns. Recurring phrases (the things you say more than once a week). Domain words (work, hobbies, family). Add the daily-life nouns first — those compound the fastest because every domain reuses them. Add the recurring phrases second — those convert directly into conversation. Add the domain words last, because they are the most rewarding but the most situational.

Drill twenty new entries a week, not fifty. The spaced-repetition curve does not care how aspirational you feel on Sunday. Twenty new entries plus the existing review queue is roughly the limit of what most learners can integrate without losing earlier material^[3]. Fifty new entries on Monday is a deck full of half-learned words by Friday.

Common Mistakes When Adding Custom Vocabulary

Three patterns we see repeatedly in the alpha that worth flagging up front. First, adding too many words at once. The plaza will accept a hundred new entries in a single session, but your spaced-repetition queue cannot. Twenty new entries a week is the practical ceiling. Beyond that, the older items start losing review slots and you end up with a deck full of half-known words instead of a smaller deck full of mastered ones.

Second, adding words without a use context. "Reservation" is fine; "I would like to make a reservation for two on Friday" is much better, because the second forms a chunk that you will be able to retrieve as a single unit when you actually need it. The plaza handles single words and full phrases identically — both get the same drilling, the same mastery curve, the same audio. There is no penalty for adding the longer form, and there is a real benefit.

Custom Words Are Part of the Build in Public

Like the rest of the plaza, custom words are shipping in alpha and being built in public. We're working on faster bulk import, smarter type detection (so new words get placed in the right MadLibs slots automatically), and a "suggested custom words" feature that notices what you look up outside the app and offers to add them for you.

If you want any of those sooner, the usual answer applies: come use the feature, tell us what you wish it did, and the next release will be a little sharper because of it.

Step into the plaza, add five words from your actual life, and start drilling. You'll feel the difference inside a week.