The Familiarity field is a 5-star rating, and it's the only field in this database that requires you to be honest with yourself. It's the field where most vocabulary systems break down — because learners rate words as familiar after seeing them twice and then wonder why those words don't surface in their spoken output six months later.
The Passive Recognition Trap
Every serious language learner hits the same ceiling: reading comprehension improves, vocabulary recognition expands, and active recall stalls completely. You can read a word in a novel and understand it in context. You cannot produce it in conversation thirty minutes later. The gap between passive recognition and active deployment is where vocabulary learning goes to die.
The reason is almost always the same: the learning system rewarded recognition rather than production. You saw the word, you understood it, you moved on. The Familiarity rating went to three or four stars after that first recognition, and the word dropped out of active review because it seemed "known."
This template fights that pattern explicitly with two separate sentence fields: Sample Sentences and Practice Sentences. Sample sentences are sourced — they come from the book, article, or conversation where you encountered the word. They show the word in its natural context, in someone else's syntax. Practice sentences are yours. You write them. Using the word in your own construction, in your own idiomatic register, is the production exercise that passive review skips entirely.
What Gets Captured at Encounter
The Source field — Book, News, Web, Others — combined with Source Info creates the provenance layer that most vocabulary lists don't bother with. "Liminal" logged from a news piece about architectural design carries different contextual associations than the same word encountered in a literary fiction piece about adolescence. The source isn't just attribution — it's contextual information about register, domain, and the way the word is actually deployed in real writing.
Date Added gives you a chronological record of acquisition. Sorting your database by date added shows vocabulary growth over time — and shows the dry spells, the months where very few words were added, which correspond almost exactly to the months where language exposure dropped off. That correlation is uncomfortable data, but it's useful data.
Audio is the field that breaks the text-only limitation. Pronunciation is not derivable from spelling in English, and it's often counterintuitive in French, Portuguese, and a dozen other languages where the written form misleads a learner who's been reading more than listening. Record yourself saying the word correctly — after checking against a dictionary pronunciation — and the audio is stored with the record. Next time you review the entry, you hear it, not just see it.
The Review Architecture
Reviewed on is a single date field, which means it tracks the most recent review rather than a full review history. That's a deliberate design choice — one date field is lightweight, quick to update, and still functional for identifying stale entries. Filter by reviewed date more than thirty days ago and you have your overdue review list. Filter by familiarity one or two stars and you have your priority practice targets.
The pairing of familiarity rating and review date is what makes the spaced repetition logic work without specialized software. Words rated 1-2 stars reviewed yesterday need review again in two or three days. Words rated 4-5 stars reviewed last week can wait a month. You don't need an algorithm to make that judgment — you just need both fields populated correctly so you can sort and prioritize manually.
Comments carries the linguistic nuance that doesn't fit elsewhere: the regional variation, the connotation shift in different contexts, the common collocations, the false cognate warning for a speaker of a related language. The word "actually" in English is used to politely contradict. "Actuellement" in French means "currently." A comment field note on that cognate trap prevents the mistake from surfacing in a conversation with a native speaker.
Web Links points back to a dictionary entry, an etymological source, or an extended usage example. For learners working in technical or domain-specific vocabulary — legal French, medical Spanish, technical German — having the authoritative reference linked to the entry means review doesn't require reconstructing the research.