Vocabulary, serialised
vocatale builds the story around your vocabulary list, you decide what happens in the next episodes, and your words return chapter after chapter until you own them.
The city had no ground floor. Mei took the lift to level nine and stepped out onto a street with traffic on it — real traffic, buses, a man selling noodles — and above her, another street, and above that, another.
It was , the way it always was in August. She had eleven minutes and a face that was, unfortunately, .
What happens next?
…or type your own direction.
The problem
Words only really stick when you bump into them in context, over and over, in situations you actually care about. We all know this.
The problem is practical: nobody has time to hunt down twenty different articles that just happen to contain the twenty specific words they're learning this week.
So we built an app that brings the text to the words instead.
How it works
Scroll through it — every step comes with the screen it produces.
Step 01
Paste a list, or collect them as you go. You only need 5 words to create a story.
Step 02
Pick the genre, mood, narrator, or even an author's style ("hard sci-fi," "Hemingway"). Or let the app decide for you.
Step 03
Chapters are short. At the end of each one, pick from three suggested story directions or type your own. The next chapter follows your lead.
Step 04
Every chapter pulls a fresh batch of words from your list and weaves them into the story. Words move from Learning to Mastered automatically, based on how many times you want to see them.
Backed by research
Three findings vocabulary researchers keep replicating. All three point the same way: variety in how you meet a word, not volume.
A word met in a courtroom, a breakup and a boardroom gets wired into three different settings — three separate routes back to it. Met twenty times in one drill, it gets one. Contextual diversity predicts how fast a word becomes usable better than raw frequency does.
In vocatale Every chapter is a new scene, so the second encounter never feels like the first.
That's what researcher Paul Nation found it takes to move a word from vaguely familiar to genuinely usable.
In vocatale You set the bar. The default sits mid-range; push it to 30 if you want to be stricter.
Ten encounters in one sitting does almost nothing. The same ten across a month is what forces recall — and recall is what sticks.
In vocatale Your words are spaced across chapters and days, not drilled all at once.
Nobody disputes any of this. Writing that much variety by hand is the part nobody does. Read the papers
Languages & access
Pick your native language once. Every definition, example sentence, and menu switches to it — while the story itself stays entirely in your target language.
Tap one to see it
One tap on any word. The story keeps its language; the explanation arrives in yours.
Pricing
$0 with your own API key
TBA price to be announced
FAQ
They're good enough to keep you reading, which is the whole point. Plus, you control the genre, tone, and tropes. If you get bored, you can fix the plot in the settings.
No, and it's not meant to. A flashcard deck is great for meeting a word for the very first time. vocatale is where the word goes after that — so you can see it in enough real sentences to actually recognise it on the fly.
You only need 5 words to generate your first chapter.
Only if you're on the free plan, and it's less involved than it sounds — most people are set up in about a minute with a free-tier provider like DeepSeek. The app walks you through it. If you'd rather skip that step entirely, join the Lite/Pro waitlist and everything works out of the box.
Yes. You can even describe a custom universe in as much detail as you want.
It happens. LLMs can occasionally fumble a grammar rule or use a weird regional idiom. We aim for high-quality input, but when in doubt, trust your dictionary.
Drop in five words and see what the first chapter does with them.