The Lemnly Notebook
Field notes on memory, language, and building the tool we wanted.
Long-form essays, short observations, and the occasional engineering teardown. New issues every other Tuesday.
Reading to learn a language on your iPhone: the honest options
The method everyone agrees on is best served by tools built for a device most people do not read on. Here is what actually exists on iOS in 2026 — including which ones are a website in an app costume — and the five-minute test that tells you if one will last.
You finished Duolingo and still can’t read a newspaper. Here’s why
The owl takes you to roughly A2 and then runs out of road, and the gap it leaves is not made of grammar. It is made of volume. What that means in practice, and a first week that does something about it.
How to pick your first book in Spanish (and admit when it’s too hard)
Most people choose a first Spanish book three levels above them, blame themselves when it hurts, and stop. A two-minute test that prevents it, plus where to find things at the level you are actually at.
Reading Lord of the Rings in Spanish: what eight months looked like
I moved from Berlin to San José with ten-year-old school Spanish and a 1,200-page paperback. This is the actual routine — including the month I wasted, the thing I got wrong about listening, and what I would tell myself on the plane.
Reading a news article in your target language, on your phone
Novels are a commitment. A news story is four hundred words and takes six minutes, which makes it the most underrated reading material at the intermediate stage. How to pick one you can actually finish, and what to do with the words.
Spaced repetition, and the four buttons everyone presses wrong
The theory takes two minutes to explain and almost nobody gets the practice right. What FSRS does that fixed intervals cannot, why your grading is probably lying to the scheduler, and the three ways an app can ruin it anyway.
Reading is the cheat code, and three ways people ruin it
Ask ten people who got fluent as adults how they did it and eight say the same thing. The principle is easy. The execution has three specific failure modes, and everybody hits at least one.
How many words do you actually need? The three numbers that matter
Fluency is not a number. Coverage is. Here are the three vocabulary sizes that change what you can do, what they feel like from the inside, and roughly how long each stretch takes.
The forgetting curve is a timetable, not a diagnosis
Everyone quotes Ebbinghaus at you to explain why you forget. Almost nobody explains the part that matters: the curve changes shape every time you use it. Here is what that means for your five minutes a day.
Anki or Lemnly? An honest decision tree from a nine-year Anki user
I used Anki for nine years and cards I made in 2017 still come up. Here is who should stay, who should switch, and the thing I have to tell you up front: there is no deck import, and that matters.
The shared vocabulary cache, and why a free tier can survive AI costs
Labelling every unknown word with an LLM is the obvious design and it gets expensive in exactly the wrong direction — the more people read, the more you pay. Here is the cache that fixes it, what it deliberately does not store, and what I do not know yet.
A chapter tonight.
The words still there next week.
Free. Pick a story at your level, tap the words you don’t know, and let Lemnly bring them back at the right time.
No credit card · Spanish, German and English today
