Building Your Working Vocabulary
Stop memorizing endless word lists that slip away by tomorrow. Learn how to spot, decode, and permanently adopt expressive words into your everyday speech and writing.
Like Duolingo, but for Building Your Working Vocabulary. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
21 levels across 4 sections, about 42 minutes end to end, roughly 8 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Catching Words in the Wild, Deconstructing Word Anatomy, From Recognition to Fluent Speech, and Building a Retention Engine. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Building Your Working Vocabulary
- Vocably cards need surrounding story or emotion because the brain quickly forgets isolated pairs
- Context gives a new word an emotional and situational hook that rote definitions lack
- Aim for text where you already understand roughly 95% of the words (about 1 unknown word per 20)
- Too many unknown words destroys comprehension anchors, making Vocably cards hard to understand
- Saving the full sentence preserves natural prepositions, tone, and grammatical patterns
- A single word alone loses the surrounding rhythm that shows how native speakers actually use it
- Only stop to save words that completely block your understanding of the main plot or argument
- Save words that show up multiple times across paragraphs
- Ignore one-off descriptive words that do not hurt overall comprehension
- High-utility words appear frequently and give you immediate chances to practice them
- Rare or literary curiosities clog your Vocably review queue without giving practical everyday payback
- Words like 'unlike', 'however', or 'in spite of' signal a 180-degree flip from a nearby described trait
- If the brother is outgoing ('gregarious'), the contrast marker proves Maya avoids socializing
- Vocably teaches you to find the known opposite to deduce the target word before looking it up
- Authors frequently define uncommon words directly inside the sentence using dashes or parentheses
- Commas right next to an unknown noun often hold a quick plain-English descriptive restatement
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Building Your Working Vocabulary the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Why does meeting a new word in a rich sentence work better than a bare dictionary list?
Get it right to open this lesson and 20 more in the app.
Where Building Your Working Vocabulary takes you
- 1
Catching Words in the Wild
- Upgrading From Word Lists to Real Encounters
- Unpacking Meaning From Clues on the Page
- 2
Deconstructing Word Anatomy
- Cracking Word Families With Roots and Affixes
- 3
From Recognition to Fluent Speech
- Breaking Out of Passive Recognition
- Learning Words in Chunks and Collocations
- 4
Building a Retention Engine
- Designing Spaced Retrieval Routines
- Curating a Living Personal Lexicon
4 sections · 7 units · 21 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Building Your Working Vocabulary is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start Building Your Working Vocabulary today.
Download Tomo, search Building Your Working Vocabulary, and play your first lesson in under a minute.