At its core, Tiwtor is a flashcard app and as such, will feel familiar to anybody that has used software like Anki or good ol’ physical flashcards!
A day with Tiwtor
Open the app and your queue tells you what’s due. You spend five minutes reviewing previous phrases, and another five minutes learning new ones. Perhaps you’ll then play a listening exercise on repeat whilst on the bus, or practise a monologue while waiting for the kettle to boil. Tomorrow there’ll be a fresh set of phrases waiting.
There are no streaks, no points and no daily quota to fall behind on. Miss a week and the queue will simply have a bit more waiting for you when you get back. You can set daily goals if you wish.
Flashcards
In your day to day learning with Tiwtor you’ll be presented with phrases to translate into Welsh. You’ll indicate a success or a failure to recall and difficult phrases will pop up more regularly than those you can remember.
Under the bonnet this is spaced repetition - the same algorithm that powers Anki & others. Each time you rate a phrase, Tiwtor works out when you’re likely to forget it and schedules it to come back just before you do. Phrases you know well drift out to weeks or months; phrases you struggle come back earlier.
Tiwtor flashes more than simple flashcards, however...
Orbiting exercises
The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it - to hit it from many different angles - to use all the senses.
To that end - the same phrases that you’re practising through flashcards, you’ll see popping up in conversations you can listen to, in speaking exercises where you say the phrase out loud and compare yourself with the recording, in monologues that you can memorise or even in “children’s books”. We also have a hands-free mode that you can use when you’re on the move - which will feel very similar to anybody that has used the excellent SSiW.
Every phrase list in our collections comes with accompanying exercises you can add to your library.
Your library, your queue
A few words you’ll see everywhere in the app:
- A phrase list is a handful of phrases on a theme - “At the chippy”, say - and is Tiwtor’s main “unit of learning”
- An exercise is a conversation, monologue or book built from one or more phrase lists.
- A collection is an official bundle of phrase lists and exercises, found under Explore.
- Your library is everything you’ve added or created - stuff you want to learn at some point.
- Your queue is the phrase lists you’re learning right now. Your daily flashcards draw from these and nothing else.
You can pluck phrase lists and exercises from our official collections, adding them to your library. Adding something to your library doesn’t start you learning it - you stick it in your queue once you’re ready.
Make it yours
Once you’ve found your feet, we highly recommend that you create your own phrase lists and exercises based on your day to day experiences! It’s much easier to learn a language, when you’re learning relevant phrases that you’ll actually use...
For example - I myself have two kids in Welsh-medium schools - and so my own queue holds phrases I can use with them - e.g. I have one phrase list called “School mornings” and another “Outside the school gate” - both of which you can add to your own library!
Whatever you write, you can use our authoring tools to build your own related listening, reading & speaking exercises around it. You can learn more on how to do this here.
De or Gog?
When you sign up you pick a dialect - southern or northern - and every phrase, recording and exercise in our collections comes in both. Swap at any time from settings. If you’re after some other flavour of Welsh, whether it’s Dyfedeg or y Wladfa you can use our authoring tools to create or generate lists and exercises that are more specific.
Phrase forestry
With Tiwtor - you’ll learn smaller constituent phrases & words before building up to longer phrases & sentences.
Take “Dw i’n mynd i’r siop” - I’m going to the shop. Before you ever see the whole sentence you’ll have met “dw i’n mynd” (I’m going) and “i’r siop” (to the shop) on their own. And “i’r siop” will turn up again inside “Wyt ti’n dod i’r siop?” - are you coming to the shop? - so by the time you get there, half the work is done.
We call this web of shared building blocks the “phrase forest”. It’s why Tiwtor feels easier the longer you use it - and why, when you’re stood outside the school gate, you can eventually throw together a sentence you were never actually taught directly.
Even if you create your own phrase lists, you can benefit from this. These branches are pulled out automatically as you create your phrase lists using... magic.
Ask the Tiwtor Assistant
In our view, learning grammar isn’t a requirement - but it can be interesting! And sometimes you just need to know the why, or the wtf.
From any exercise you can select text and ask the AI-powered Tiwtor Assistant what’s going on: why that mutation, why “yn” here and not there, whether people really say it like that.
The assistant can even create phrase lists for you! Good if you encounter some concept that you’d like to drill on down the line e.g. “create a phrase list filled with phrases similar to this”
Where it runs
Tiwtor is on iOS, Android and the web, and your progress syncs between them. The app works offline - your queue, your flashcards and any audio you’ve already listened to are all on the device.