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Wortel
Your second brain and retention layer for language learning.
Stop making cards. Dump the words, phrases, and grammar you meet. Wortel structures them, connects them, and grows them into permanent memory by making you use them.
Hey all,
I built Wortel because every language learning app taught me their own words but never the ones I actually run into during comprehensible input.
You read an article, watch a show, have a conversation, and hit a word you don't know. You look it up, feel good, and forget it a week later.
Wortel is a second brain for the language you're learning. You capture the words and phrases you actually meet, and it does the rest: structures each one (meaning, forms, examples, grammar), files it into your personal knowledge base, then drills you on exactly what you're weakest at, in the way most likely to make it stick.
A few things I cared about building it:
1. It targets your gaps. Every session mixes what you're solid on with what you're struggling with, so you're always consolidating and stretching, never grinding random flashcards.
2. Recognition ≠ production. Knowing a word when you see it and being able to actually use it are different skills. Wortel tracks them separately and pushes you toward producing the language.
3. Nothing fake. It teaches a language, so a made-up word or a wrong conjugation is worse than showing nothing. A second, stronger model reviews every AI generation and drops anything that doesn't hold up.
4. Six ways to practice (recall, cloze, arrange, crossword, comprehension, free production), audio-first listening, language agnostic, on web and Android and iOS (not published yet though, looking for more feedback).
Under the hood of the knowledge retention engine, it's using an established learning science architecture:
- Spaced repetition, scheduled per word by FSRS: the spacing effect (Cepeda et al., 2006)
- Retrieval practice: every exercise is active recall, not review: the testing effect (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006)
- Desirable difficulty + interleaving in that ~70/30 mix (Bjork, 1994): tuned to keep you near an ~85% success rate (Wilson et al., 2019)
- Production over recognition: the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978)
I'd genuinely love feedback from fellow learners. Questions and constructive criticism is welcome!
The metaphor actually extends all the way through the app, which is a nice touch. Love that "wortel" means carrot in Dutch too.
About Wortel on Product Hunt
“Your second brain and retention layer for language learning.”
Wortel was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 5 upvotes and 3 comments, placing #116 on the daily leaderboard. Stop making cards. Dump the words, phrases, and grammar you meet. Wortel structures them, connects them, and grows them into permanent memory by making you use them.
Wortel was featured in Education (78.8k followers), Languages (14.4k followers) and Artificial Intelligence (473.8k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 142.5k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Wortel?
Wortel was hunted by Sarthak. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Sarthak