Why we built Vocabry

The problem that started it

Vocabry began in a Dutch language classroom, from the student side.

Each class covered a lesson and ended with a vocabulary list to memorise before the next session. Learn the list, come back the following week, get handed a new one. By the third lesson the first was mostly gone. The institute kept moving forward and retention kept resetting to zero.

Strong verbs were worse. Dutch irregulars don't follow a pattern you can reason through. You either know that "gaf" is the past tense of "geven" or you don't, and without something forcing them back at the right intervals, the same handful got relearned every few weeks.

The available apps didn't solve it. They taught their own word lists on their own schedule, unrelated to what the teacher assigned. A student could keep a streak going for months and still walk into class unprepared for that week's lesson.

The gap wasn't motivation. It was that no tool was built around the institute's actual curriculum.

What we built instead

Vocabry starts from the syllabus. Every word, example sentence and lesson comes from the institute's own textbook, in the order it's taught. Spaced repetition then keeps older lessons alive while new ones are added, using an SM-2 schedule that brings a word back right before it would otherwise be forgotten.

Dutch runs A1 through B2. German, French and Spanish use the same engine, built from whatever source material the institute teaches from.

About R.A.D Labs

R.A.D Labs stands for Reach. Automate. Deliver. We're a Chennai-based studio working across search and performance marketing, content, and custom agentic workflow builds. Vocabry is our first product, and the three words describe how it was built: reach the student where the curriculum already is, automate the review schedule so retention isn't left to willpower, deliver something an institute can put in front of a class the same term.

Where Vocabry is going

Dutch is live. German is next, with French and Spanish in development. The roadmap includes custom flashcard generation from uploaded textbook PDFs and expanded grammar drills.

Tested before it was sold

Vocabry ran its first pilot with 10 of my own classmates at a private Dutch language institute teaching A1 through B2. Small on purpose: enough to see whether curriculum-mapped review changed what students actually retained between lessons, few enough to talk to each of them. They were learning from the same syllabus, hitting the same wall, which is the only group whose feedback would have meant anything. Their reviews are the ones on our homepage.

An earlier round of feedback from friends and family shaped the product before it reached that classroom.