What is actually in one Verbavia lesson
Verbavia is one lesson a day and then you are finished. There is no feed to scroll, no shop, no lives to lose and nothing to come back to in the evening. That makes the lesson itself the whole product, so it is worth describing exactly what is in one — including the parts that are missing on purpose.
It opens with everything you owe
Before anything new, every flashcard that is due today comes back. All of them, with no cap, ever. That is a deliberate decision and it is the one people argue with, because a day with sixty cards due is a longer lesson than a day with six.
The reason is that a cap on reviews is a cap on what you remember. Spaced repetition works by bringing a word back at the moment you are about to lose it; a scheduler that says "that is enough for today, the rest tomorrow" has quietly decided that some of your words may be forgotten, and the ones it defers are the ones you were closest to losing. Every other app's daily-limit setting is a comfort feature that costs you vocabulary.
In practice the queue is self-correcting. Words you know are pushed weeks and then months away, so a steady daily habit settles into a modest warm-up. The days it is long are the days after you skipped.
New words come off the list, in order
Then a handful of new words. Where they come from is the thing that makes this course different from most: they are dealt straight down a frequency list, in order, from wherever you got to. Not a themed chapter, not the vocabulary that suits a game — the next most common words in the language you have not met yet.
The top of every one of those lists is a public page, so you can see the order without signing up: the word lists. Why that order matters is its own argument, made here.
A new word does not join your review deck the moment it is shown. It joins when you first answer it — so a word you were introduced to and never tested on is not silently scheduled against you.
The grammar is explained before it is tested
Then one grammar point. One, not a scattering.
It arrives as a written explanation with worked examples and, where the point needs one, a conjugation or case table. Then the questions. This ordering sounds too obvious to state until you notice how much language software does the opposite: it shows you a sentence, lets you guess, and calls the correction teaching. That works for a small number of patterns and falls apart on anything with a rule — which is to say on the German case system, the Spanish subjunctive, or why Mandarin 很 goes where it goes.
The points come in the course's own order, and each one comes back afterwards: the same grammar shows up in the reading and listening of later lessons, and a short review of earlier points is mixed into every lesson's questions rather than saved for an exam.
Reading and listening built only from words you have met
Every lesson has a reading passage in three parts, with comprehension questions, and then the same again for the ear.
The constraint on those passages is the part that takes the work: they are written from vocabulary you have already been taught. A story containing three words you have never seen is not a reading exercise, it is a vocabulary test with the answers hidden. At 80% coverage — which is roughly where a thousand words puts you — authentic material is mostly noise, and the point of a graded passage is to let you spend your attention on the one thing you do not know instead of the twenty.
That is also why this content cannot simply be generated on demand and shipped: the passages are written and then checked against the deck, word by word, before they go anywhere near a learner.
Writing, from lesson seven
From lesson seven onwards each lesson ends with one writing task: you produce a sentence or a short paragraph of your own and get it back marked.
Lesson seven rather than lesson one, because producing a language you have seen for six days is discouraging rather than useful, and one task rather than several, because writing is the slowest thing in the lesson and a lesson you stop finishing teaches you nothing at all.
Three lengths, and what a shorter one changes
A lesson at the fullest setting runs about twenty to thirty minutes. That is more than most people want every single day, so there are three lengths — and the interesting question is what a shorter one takes away.
| Complete | Balanced | Essentials | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading and listening | 3 parts each | 2 parts each | 1 part each |
| New words a lesson | 8 | 6 | 4 |
| Lessons per grammar point | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Writing task | every lesson | every 2nd | every 3rd |
| Roughly | 20–30 min | 15–20 min | 8–12 min |
The row that matters is the third. A shorter lesson does not strip the support out of the same lesson; it spreads one grammar point over two or three days. So an Essentials learner reaches each new difficulty having done three lessons' worth of vocabulary for it rather than half as much. It is a gentler course, not a thinner one — the same road walked in smaller steps.
The explanation itself is never cut into pieces, either. The first lesson of a group teaches, with the whole written explanation; the ones after it practise, from that lesson's own key points and the next slice of its questions. Half an explanation is not a lesson.
What is not in it
Four honest omissions.
- No speaking section on the web. It exists on Android, where the microphone goes to the device's own speech recogniser. On the web the available recogniser was not good enough to grade someone's pronunciation with, and being told your accent is wrong by software that mis-heard you is worse than having no speaking exercise. The hand-written speaking material is all still there, waiting for a recogniser worth using.
- No streak pressure. There is a streak, because seeing the number is genuinely motivating, but nothing nags you, nothing is taken away, and there is no leaderboard. One lesson, then you are done.
- No restarting a lesson you paused. A paused lesson can only be resumed. This annoys people occasionally and is the right call: restarting would let you reroll questions you got wrong, which is exactly the review you needed.
- No advertising network and no tracking. The course is free. Without a subscription there is a five-second house ad for Verbavia's own subscription before a lesson, and you study one language at a time. There is no ad network, no third-party script choosing what you see, and nothing about you used to choose it.
Where to start
Pick a language and do lesson one — it takes no account and nothing is asked of you up front.
All 8 run from absolute beginner to C2, on the same plan.