English Vocabulary Apps: Which One Actually Makes Words Stick

You're keeping a vocabulary list somewhere. In Notes, in a notebook, in an app you installed last year and haven't opened in a while. You remember looking up the word reluctant three times, and the fourth time you ran into it in a listening exercise, you still had to look it up.

That's not a failure of memory. It's a consequence of learning words like a collector: adding to the list and leaving it there, treating the act of writing it down as having learned it. A word only sticks when you have to recall it right at the moment you're about to forget it, and when it appears in a real sentence rather than sitting bare next to a line of Vietnamese meaning.

So this list isn't ranked by the number of words an app advertises. For each app, the question is three things: does it force you to actively recall instead of just re-reading, does it bring the word back at the right time, and does the word come with context. Every app below gets one sentence stating plainly where it falls short, because no app does all three well.

• Quick comparison table
• The real review-engine group
• The group that teaches words living in context
• The group of dictionaries used as learning tools
• The light daily-learning group
• Reviewing words you got wrong, taken from listening
• Combos for each type of learner
• Frequently asked questions about learning vocabulary
• What to do with this list

Quick comparison table

The middle column answers the most important question: how does that app help you remember. The last column covers what you can use without paying.

The real review-engine group

These two apps don't teach you any words at all. They do something else, and more important: keep the words you've already met from slipping away. If you only install one app from this whole list, install one of these two.

Anki

Anki is open-source flashcard software that runs on computers and phones, and it's the benchmark every other app gets measured against. The mechanism is simple: you look at the front of the card, recall the answer yourself, flip the card, then rate how easily or how hard you remembered it; the algorithm uses that rating to schedule when you'll see it again. Cards you remember well stretch out to weekly, then monthly intervals; cards you stumble on come back the very next day, so your review time concentrates exactly where you're weak. Anki is free on desktop and on Android through AnkiDroid, while the official iOS version is a one-time paid app; the software remains open source after project stewardship changed hands in 2026.

The price you pay is the first session. The interface is ugly, setup has a lot of options, and you have to build your own cards or pick an existing deck yourself. In exchange, this is the only app on the list where you have full control over the content: a good card for learning English should contain the sentence the word appears in, not just the word by itself, and Anki lets you decide that yourself.

Quizlet

Quizlet takes the opposite approach: instead of making you build cards, it opens up a huge stock of decks already made by other users. Type in the name of a textbook, an exam, or a topic, and there's a good chance someone has already made a word set for you. The app offers several study modes on the same deck, from flipping cards to writing out the word to a timed matching game, so the same list can be reviewed in a few different ways. The free version lets you create and study cards, with ads and limits on the number of attempts in heavier modes like Learn and Test; the paid tier removes those limits.

The limitation lies in the very thing that makes it strong: community-made cards vary wildly in quality, and most popular English decks are just the word sitting next to its meaning, with no example sentence. If you use Quizlet, take the trouble to look through a few sets before choosing one, and prioritize sets that include examples. The reason context determines whether something gets remembered is covered in detail in the article vocabulary in context works better than flashcards.

The group that teaches words living in context

These three apps choose the words for you and build the context around them themselves. You lose control over the content, but in exchange you don't have to put in the prep work.

Memrise

What sets Memrise apart from the rest is its clips of native speakers saying the sentence containing the word you're learning — a few seconds long, filmed in real places at real speed and with real intonation. You hear the word come out of the speaker's mouth before you see it on the card, so the word enters your head attached to sound, not just spelling, which helps a lot when you run into it again in a fast conversation. The app also has spaced repetition running underneath, plus memory tips contributed by other users. In 2026, Memrise removed community-created courses from the main app and kept the AI assistants for paying users, so the free version is leaner than it used to be.

WordUp

The question WordUp answers is one few apps dare to answer: out of the tens of thousands of English words, which ones are worth learning first. The app ranks about twenty-five thousand words by usefulness, based on how often they appear in spoken English taken from movies and TV shows, then builds you a map of what you already know and don't know so you fill in exactly the right gaps. Each word comes with many real examples from films, quotes, and news, and there's a review schedule to bring words back. The thing to weigh is that the app works best once you're already good enough to read and understand the English examples, so beginners will find it a bit overwhelming.

Vocabulary.com

This is the choice for people who like being challenged. Instead of letting you self-rate like Anki, Vocabulary.com keeps asking questions and adjusts the difficulty based on how you answer, gradually building a fairly accurate picture of the words you actually know. Its stock of ready-made word lists is huge, following textbooks, novels, and standardized tests, so test-prep learners find exactly what they need. The free version limits the number of questions per day, and the entire interface and every explanation are in English, so it's not meant for the early stage.

The group of dictionaries used as learning tools

A dictionary isn't a vocabulary-learning app, but it's the place a new word passes through first. Choosing the right dictionary and building a small habit when you look things up will decide whether that word gets a chance to stick.

TFlat

For Vietnamese speakers, TFlat is the most convenient choice for a quick lookup. It has a large English-Vietnamese word bank, works offline, has voice search and text scanning from photos, so you can even look up words you see on a signboard or in a paper document. The basic version is free and enough for looking things up; the VIP tier unlocks word-folder creation, specialized word packs, and practice games. The familiar drawback of every bilingual dictionary is still here: translating into Vietnamese gives you the feeling you've understood, while most English words don't have a neat one-to-one Vietnamese equivalent.

Laban Dictionary

Laban is a dictionary made by VNG, free, works offline, and has proper pronunciation audio for most entries. What keeps a lot of people using it is the quick-lookup popup: you highlight a word in another app and look it up right there, without switching back and forth. The English-Vietnamese content is licensed from Professor Lê Khả Kế's dictionary, so the definitions are trustworthy, with plenty of examples. It doesn't try to be a learning app, so don't expect any decent practice features here.

Cambridge Dictionary

Cambridge's mobile app is suited for an important transition: giving up looking up Vietnamese meanings and starting to read definitions in English. Cambridge writes its definitions with a deliberately limited vocabulary, so an intermediate-level reader can still understand them, and every time you read a definition, it's a chance to read a bit more English for free. The app has both British and American pronunciation, and the free version comes with ads. Use it once you can already read simple sentences fluently; before that point, an English-Vietnamese dictionary is still more effective.

Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

If you want a single dictionary and plan to use it for a long time, Oxford's app is the heaviest-hitting choice. It has a very dense bank of examples, core word lists like the Oxford 3000 and Oxford 5000 so you know what to master first, and a feature that lets you record your own voice and play it back next to a native speaker's. You can also create folders to save entries you've looked up to revisit later. The app downloads for free with a portion of the content as a trial, while unlocking the full dictionary requires a purchase, and that's the point where a lot of people stop at the trial version.

The light daily-learning group

Drops

Drops takes a completely different approach: no definitions, no example sentences, just the word and a clean illustration, and each free session is capped at about five minutes a day. That cap sounds like a downside but is actually a feature, because it turns studying into something too short for you to make excuses to skip. Learning through images also helps you connect the English word directly to the thing itself instead of going through Vietnamese, which works especially well for concrete nouns. In exchange, Drops is nearly useless for abstract words and phrasal verbs, so treat it as an appetizer, not the main course.

Reviewing words you got wrong, taken from listening

This is the WELE section, and since this is WELE's own site, this section states plainly both where it's strong and where it falls short.

The way WELE handles vocabulary differs from every app above in that it doesn't hand you a word list to learn. You do dictation on a real podcast segment, the system grades every word, and the words you misheard or mis-transcribed are exactly the ones proposed for the review queue. They come back on a spaced-repetition schedule, along with the full sentence and the audio clip you missed, so during review you're not looking at a bare word but listening again at exactly the spot your ear slipped. In other words, your word list is written by your own mistakes, not by some editor.

What WELE doesn't do should also be said plainly. This isn't an all-purpose vocabulary app: there's no community deck library, no ready-made exam word set to grind through, and you can't type in an arbitrary word list yourself and have it review that for you. If your goal is to cram two thousand words for an exam in six weeks, Anki or Quizlet will serve you better. WELE fits when the goal is listening comprehension, because that's when the real question isn't how many words you know but how many words you recognize as they fly past your ear at real speed. To estimate your current vocabulary before picking an app, the vocabulary test takes a few minutes.

Combos for each type of learner

Nobody needs all eleven apps. What you need is one review app, one word source, and one dictionary; those three are enough for several years. Below are four combos people commonly use.

• Starting over from scratch. Drops or Memrise for the basic vocabulary, plus an English-Vietnamese dictionary like TFlat or Laban. You don't need Anki at this stage, since building cards will eat up the energy that should go toward learning.
• A packed schedule, only a few spare minutes a day. A single review app, opened at a fixed hour, plus the habit of saving words you run into at work. How to make use of short gaps of time is covered in the article for busy people.
• Currently prepping for an exam. Quizlet for word sets matching the exam, Vocabulary.com for question practice, and a fixed schedule. Exams have a deadline, so this is the rare case where grinding through a word list actually makes sense.
• Reading comprehension is fine, but you can't keep up when listening. Your problem isn't the number of words but the speed of recognizing them. Take words from your own listening material and review them along with the audio, instead of learning yet another new list. The article how many words to learn and how explains why the gap between words you can recognize while reading and while listening is so large.

Frequently asked questions about learning vocabulary

How many new words should you learn each day?

Fewer than the number you're thinking of. The number of new words you add each day determines how much review load you'll be carrying for months to come, and most people who give up do so because the review pile ballooned, not because the new material was hard. A small handful of words a day, kept up consistently for a year, gives far better results than one week of cramming followed by three weeks off.

Should you learn single words or whole phrases?

Whole phrases, almost always. English uses a huge number of fixed combinations, and knowing the meaning of each individual word in a phrase doesn't help you understand the phrase as a whole. When making cards or saving a word, save the whole phrase and the whole sentence you met it in — don't chop it down into a single word.

Anki is too complicated, is there a lighter option?

Yes. Quizlet gives you most of the benefit for a fraction of the setup effort, and Memrise handles everything for you. Anki is only worth the effort if you want to decide the card content yourself and plan to stick with it for years. Don't let choosing an app become an excuse to put off studying.

Can you use a dictionary app instead of a vocabulary-learning app?

Yes for looking things up, no for remembering. Looking up a word is an act of re-reading, and re-reading creates almost no long-term memory; what creates memory is recalling something yourself before you've seen the answer. A few dictionaries have added saving and practice features, but they're a lot lighter than a real review app.

How long before your vocabulary starts helping you listen better?

Faster than you'd expect if the words you review are taken from the very things you listen to, and slower than you'd expect if the words come from a disconnected list. The reason is that listening comprehension requires you to recognize a word within a few tenths of a second, and that ability only forms once you've heard that word spoken in a sentence. How to choose listening material by topic so words repeat naturally is discussed in the article choosing podcasts by topic.

What to do with this list

Pick one review app and one word source, delete the rest, then open that review app at a fixed hour every day. If your word source is what your ear keeps missing, take it from your own listening: the podcast library with transcripts is the place to start, and other options on the same topic are in the article English-learning apps and the article English-learning websites.