The best app to learn English words in 2026

What makes English words hard

• Spelling and pronunciation differ. You need to hear every new word, not only read it.
• Phrasal verbs and collocations. get up, put off, make a decision: meaning lives in combinations.
• Many synonyms. big, large, huge: the difference shows only in context.
• A big target. About 3,000 words for B1 and 4,000 for C1.

1. NewLexi

Built exactly for these problems. Add words from a photo of your textbook, a text, a series, Anki or Quizlet, or generate a set on any topic or straight for an exam. Each word gets spaced repetition and comes back in stories and dialogues at your level with audio, so you hear the pronunciation and see phrasal verbs and collocations in real sentences. Grammar lessons, a writing trainer with AI feedback and a game layer are in the same daily plan.

• Best for: anyone learning English: school, university, IELTS, work, travel.
• Free: spaced repetition of all your words, translator and import, no ads.

2. Anki

Flexible flashcards with huge shared English decks. Strong algorithm, but you build cards and context yourself, and the iOS app is paid.

• Best for: learners who like to tune everything.

→ NewLexi vs Anki in detail

3. Quizlet

Ready-made English sets for every textbook and exam. Good for cramming before a class, weaker for long-term memory.

• Best for: school and university classes.

→ NewLexi vs Quizlet in detail

4. Duolingo

A game-like English course. Builds a habit, but words come in the order of the course and you cannot add your own.

• Best for: beginners who need a daily habit.

→ NewLexi vs Duolingo in detail

5. Memrise

English courses with videos of native speakers. Good for hearing real speech; most tools are in Pro.

• Best for: learners who like video.

→ NewLexi vs Memrise in detail

How to remember English words for good: 9 tips that work

1. Add only as many new words as you can review. With spaced repetition, daily reviews settle at about 5–10 times your daily new words. 10 new words a day means roughly 50–100 reviews, about 15–20 minutes. If reviews take longer, add fewer new words for a few days instead of skipping reviews.
2. Choose words for your goal, not from a random list. A word you will not meet in the next month is likely to fade. Learn the vocabulary of your exam, your job or the series you watch, and save the rest for later.
3. Check the stress and sounds of every new word. In English spelling rarely tells you the pronunciation, and stress can even change the part of speech: REcord is a noun, reCORD is a verb. Listen to the word and repeat it out loud before you add it.
4. Learn a word together with its neighbours. Write down the phrase where you met the word, not the word alone. Native speakers say “heavy rain”, not “strong rain”, and you only learn that from real combinations.
5. Recall first, then check. Before you flip a card, say the answer out loud or in your head. Trying to recall strengthens memory far more than reading the answer again (Karpicke and Roediger, 2008), even when the attempt fails.
6. Make your own sentence about your life. Words you use in a sentence you made up yourself are remembered better than words you only read (the generation effect). “I have to make a decision about my flat” sticks better than an example from a dictionary.
7. Meet each word about ten times in different texts. Research suggests it takes around ten encounters for a word to settle in (Webb, 2007). Flashcards give you some of them; the rest should come from reading and listening.
8. Read texts where you know 98% of the words. At that level you can understand a text without a dictionary and guess the new words from context (Hu and Nation, 2000). A text where every fifth word is new is tiring and teaches less.
9. Do not learn similar words on the same day. Words from one tight group, such as all the colours or left and right, get mixed up when you learn them together (Tinkham, 1993). Spread them over several days and learn words by topic instead.

In NewLexi most of this happens on its own: the daily plan keeps the balance of new words and reviews, every card asks you to recall before showing the answer, stories and dialogues from your words are written just for you at your level so you meet them again and again, and the writing trainer checks the sentences you make up.

Preparing for IELTS? Add the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000): 570 word families that appear in academic texts of every subject. More in how many words you need for IELTS 6.5 and 7.0.

Sources

1. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
2. Anki Manual. docs.ankiweb.net
3. Quizlet. quizlet.com
4. Duolingo. www.duolingo.com
5. Memrise. www.memrise.com
6. Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968. doi.org/10.1126/science.1152408
7. Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592–604. doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.6.592
8. Webb, S. (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65. doi.org/10.1093/applin/aml048
9. Hu, M., & Nation, I. S. P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403–430. nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/item/253
10. Tinkham, T. (1993). The effect of semantic clustering on the learning of second language vocabulary. System, 21(3), 371–380. doi.org/10.1016/0346-251X(93)90027-E
11. Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238. doi.org/10.2307/3587951