SlovoCard

Why I wanted it

Living in Montenegro, I did not need one clean textbook standard. I needed the words people around me use, plus enough context to understand where Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin differ.

So I built the vocabulary tool I wanted: a large deck and a quiet review loop that brings back the words I forget.

The 8,000-word deck

SlovoCard contains more than 8,000 words. I started with frequency-ranked vocabulary and phrase material, then moved it into a Supabase dataset. Definitions and IPA come from Wiktionary, images from Wikimedia Commons, and example sentences from Tatoeba. The source stays attached to each entry.

The number is easy to quote. The work is correcting bad translations and making each card teach one clear meaning. The four languages share one Serbo-Croatian core in SlovoCard, with metadata and phrase variants where the regional difference matters.

How review works

The scheduler is Anki-like and based on SM-2. Cards move through new, learning, review, and relearning states. Your rating changes the interval and ease factor. Easy words wait longer. Missed words return sooner.

I use it myself. A wrong entry teaches me the wrong thing again and again. An awkward prompt wastes my time every time it returns. That makes both problems hard to ignore.

Corrections are part of the product

One July fix was two seconds long. Typed cards advanced as soon as an answer was submitted, leaving too little time to read the correction. I added a two-second reveal to the cloze and listening cards. The regression test submits bubreg, checks that the correction stays visible and only then allows the next card. The scheduler had accepted the answer. The learner still needed to see it.

Learners can report vocabulary problems and regional mismatches. Those reports have corrected entries and improved review behaviour. Importing a deck is the easy part. Keeping it accurate takes use and corrections.

Where it is now

The deck and review loop work. Onboarding does not explain the four regional variants well enough yet. That is the next thing to fix.

Learn Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin with SlovoCard