How to actually remember the Hindi vocabulary you're learning

You know the feeling. You're having your Hindi lesson with your tutor. In addition to all the grammar rules, you're learning ten new words every session. You walk out and plan to review them every day. But then one day passes and you didn't find the time. The second day starts and you're already thinking that you'd need to scroll through a full page of exercise sentences in your Google Sheets document just to find those new words. And since this pattern is not new, you'd actually have to go through multiple pages. Where do you even start?

Then you muster the courage, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and add all those words to a list. You start reading through them, and by number 30 you're tired and start thinking that there must be a better way.

There is. And once you understand how memory actually works, it starts to make a lot of sense.

Why words don't stick

So what does science have to say? Well, first of all, the brain doesn't store everything it encounters. And even if it stores something, it tends to lose it again if not refreshed regularly. Researchers call this the forgetting curve. Memory decays on a predictable schedule, dropping steeply in the first few days after learning something new.

The fix kinda lies in the same automatism. The same way the brain forgets, it remembers. It stores things it encounters repeatedly, spaced out over time. So it's not about studying harder. It's about studying smarter. Review the word at the right moment — just before you'd forget it. Once after a day. Again after three days. Again after a week. After that, the word tends to stick.

Twenty words practised consistently will serve you better than two hundred words reviewed once and never again.

This system is called spaced repetition, and it's well established in language learning research. Most serious learning apps use it. Mera does too.

The problem with Hindi learning apps

Speaking of apps... I tried a bunch of them. Every single one (that I found) starts by teaching Devanagari. But I wanted to learn conversational Hindi first and maybe add the script later. So many of my Indian friends speak Hindi fluently but cannot read or write it. And they don't need to! So those apps were off the table.

What about general flashcard or exercise apps? I tried a few of those too. The onboarding is long and tedious, there's usually only one or two exercise types, and since they're not language-specific, there's no safety net when uploading content. What if I want to learn Devanagari at some point? No support for that. No help with pronunciation. No automation when adding new words. It's just you, a text field, and the hope that you typed everything correctly.

What all of these situations have in common: the vocabulary that matters most to you isn't in any app's preset list. It's yours. Specific to your life, your conversations, your learning path.

Why I built Mera

I was stuck in exactly this situation: Learning Hindi with a tutor on Preply, collecting new words every week, and watching them disappear before the next session. Paper flashcards got left at home. Generic apps had their vocabulary, not mine. So I built Mera.

Mera is built around your vocabulary, not a preset curriculum. Roman script by default, so you can focus on the words without Devanagari as a prerequisite. And multiple exercise types that go well beyond flashcards, including a gender quiz built specifically for Hindi nouns.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Hindi nouns are gendered. Ladka (boy) is masculine, ladki (girl) is feminine. Getting the gender right affects how every verb and adjective around it behaves. Most apps ignore this entirely. Mera tracks gender knowledge separately from your overall word mastery, so you always know exactly where you stand.

Five ways to practise or just let Mera decide

One of the most effective things you can do for retention is encounter the same word in different contexts. Mera has five exercise types, each asking something different of your memory:

These five exercise types are available any time from the All Exercises screen. Pick whichever you feel like, and Mera will pull in a set of words based on where you are with your mastery.

But for most days, you don't need to choose at all. That's what Daily Mix is for. From the home screen, you set how many words you want to practice. The default is 20, but you can go as low as 5 or as high as 100. Tap Daily Mix and Mera takes it from there: it picks a connected set of words (all your Home & Living vocabulary, say, or all your colours) and takes you through a rotating mix of exercises to practice that set from different angles. No decisions required. Just show up.

Know exactly where you're struggling

Spaced repetition tells you when to review a word. But it doesn't always tell you why you keep getting it wrong. Or help you zero in on the words that need the most work.

Mera has a Mistakes Bank that automatically organises your problem words into four categories:

This matters because the words you keep failing aren't usually random. Having them grouped means you can go straight to the problem rather than waiting for the algorithm to surface them again.

The simplest system that works

After a lesson, add the new words to Mera. Include the Hindi, the English, and if you have it, an example sentence from your lesson. Those are worth their weight in gold for remembering context later.

Then open the app each day and tap Daily Mix. Not two hours on Sunday. Five to ten minutes daily. The consistency is the whole point.

That's genuinely it. Mera handles the spaced repetition schedule, surfaces the right words at the right time, and flags the ones you keep getting wrong. You just have to show up.

It sounds almost too simple. But the learners who actually retain vocabulary aren't doing anything exotic. They're just reviewing their words regularly, in a way that matches how memory works. Turns out the rainy Sunday afternoon method doesn't.