Word nerds with a love for linguistic curiosities and novel nomenclature that’s extra fulsome than their skill to make fascinating new phrases stick will probably be thrilled by Yak Tack: A neat little aide–mémoire (in Android and iOS app type) designed for increasing (English) vocabulary, both as a native speaker or language learner.
Yak Tack makes use of adaptive spaced repetition to assist customers keep in mind new phrases — drawing on a system devised within the 1970s by German scientist Sebastian Leitner.
The app’s core mechanic is a course of it calls ‘tacking’. Here’s the way it works: A person comes throughout a new phrase and inputs it into Yak Tack to search for what it means (definition content material for phrases and ideas is sourced from Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and Wikpedia by way of their API, per the developer).
Now they’ll select to ‘tack’ the phrase to assist them keep in mind it.
This means the app will instigate its system of area repetition to fight the routine downside of reminiscence decay/forgetting, as new data tends to be jettisoned by our brains until we make a devoted effort to keep in mind it (and/or occasions conspire to make it memorable for different, not essentially very nice causes).
Tacked phrases are proven to Yak Tack customers by way of push notification at spaced intervals (after 1 day, 2,3,5,8, and 13; following the fibonacci sequence).
Tapping on the notification takes the person to their in-app Tack Board the place they get to re-read the definition. It additionally shows all of the phrases they’ve tacked and their progress within the studying sequence for each.
After the second repeat of a phrase there’s a gamified twist because the person should choose the proper definition or synonym — relying on how far alongside within the studying sequence they’re — from a multiple-choice checklist.
Picking the precise reply means the educational proceeds to the following fibonacci interval. An incorrect reply strikes the person again to the earlier interval — that means they need to repeat that step, retightening (as a substitute of increasing) the information-exposure interval; therefore adaptive area repetition.
It’s a simple and neat use of digital prompts to assist make new phrases stick.
The app additionally has a simple and neat person interface. It truly began as an email-only reminder system, says developer Jeremy Thomas, who made the device for himself, wanting to develop his personal vocabulary — and was (deliberately) the only person for the primary six months after it launched in 2019. (He was additionally behind an earlier (now discontinued) vocabulary app known as Ink Paste.)
For now Yak Tack is a aspect/ardour mission so he can maintain coding (and indulge his “entrepreneurial proclivities”, as he wordily places it), his day job being head of product engineering at Gusto. But he sees enterprise potential in bootstrapping the educational device — and has included it as an LLC.
“We have just over 500 users spread across the world (17 different timezones). We’re biggest in Japan, Germany, and the U.S.,” he tells TechCrunch.
“I’m funding it myself and have no plans to take on investment. I’ve learned to appreciate technology companies that have an actual business model underneath them,” he provides. “There’s an elegance to balancing growth and business fundamentals, and given the low cost of starting a SaaS business, I’m surprised more companies don’t bootstrap, frankly.”
The email-only model of Yak Tack nonetheless works (you ship an electronic mail to word@yaktack.com with the phrase you’d like to be taught as the topic and the spaced repeats occur in the identical sequence — however over electronic mail). But the cell app is far more standard, per Thomas.
It is additionally (inevitably) extra social, displaying customers phrases tacked by different customers who tacked the identical phrase as them — so there’s a little bit of phrase discovery serendipity thrown in. However the person who will get essentially the most out of Yak Tack is positively the voracious and lively reader who’s ingesting a lot of textual content elsewhere and taking the time to search for (and tack) new and unfamiliar phrases as they discover them.
The app itself doesn’t do main lifting on the phrase discovery entrance — however it’s going to serve up random encounters by displaying you lists of newest tacks, most-tacked this month and phrases from some other customers you observe. (There’s additionally a ‘last week’s most tacked phrases’ notification despatched weekly.)
Taking a step again, one of many merciless paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic is that whereas it’s made schooling for teenagers more durable, as education has typically been pressured to go distant, it’s given many stuck-at-home adults extra time on their palms than ordinary to put their thoughts to studying new stuff — which explains why on-line language studying has seen an uplift over the previous 12 months+.
And with the pandemic remaining the brand new dystopian ‘normal’ in most elements of the world, market circumstances appear fairly conducive for a self-improvement device like Yak Tack.
“We’ve seen a lot of good user growth during the pandemic, in large part because I think people are investing in themselves. I think that makes the timing right for an app like Yak Tack,” says Thomas.
Yak Tack is freemium, with free utilization for 5 lively tacks (and a queue system for some other phrases you add); or $5 a 12 months for limitless tacks and no queue.
“I figure the worldwide TAM [total addressable market] of English-learners is really big, and at that low price point Yak Tack is both accessible and is a huge business opportunity,” he provides.