I read through all the comments, and one theme kept coming up again and again: Most people don’t struggle with starting language learning — they struggle with making vocabulary actually stick long-term.

Streaks, flashcards, progress bars, and “feeling productive” came up a lot. But so did frustration: people doing everything “right” for months, yet forgetting words when they actually need them.

So I’d like to zoom out and ask a more fundamental question:

For those who learned a language seriously — what actually helped vocabulary stick long-term?

• Was it audio? • Personal sentences? • Immersion? • Writing? • Teaching others? • Something else entirely?

Related to that, I’m curious about something else:

Why do people stop using language learning apps, even when they genuinely want to learn? Is it motivation, friction, lack of personal relevance, or something else?

And more broadly — do you think tools that let learners fully control their own content (words, sentences, context) and turn that content into audio they can listen to regularly actually help with long-term retention?

I’m especially interested in what worked after the initial motivation wore off.