Add your first words

Before you start: pick a study language

MemDecks holds one study language at a time, and every card, topic pack and game belongs to it. Choose the language first, in Profile, or MemDecks will ask you on your first visit. Switching later does not delete anything — it shows a different collection, and your old one is waiting when you switch back.

Option 1: a Phrase Builder lesson (fastest)

Phrase Builder is a lesson-style game. One lesson introduces five words, speaks them inside a single phrase, then mixes challenges that rebuild the whole phrase from its pieces. Finishing the lesson saves all five words to your collection as cards, already carrying images and audio.

1. Open the Games tab.
2. Choose Phrase Builder.
3. Work through the lesson to the end. The five words land in your collection when you finish.

Phrase Builder lessons exist for nine study languages as of 2 September 2026 — Armenian, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German, French and Italian — with fourteen published lessons in each, so 350 words in total. For the other seven study languages the game does not appear, and one of the three options below is the way in.

Option 2: the Translator, one word at a time

The Translator turns any single word into a card. Type an English word to get the study-language translation, or type a study-language word to get its English meaning; either direction produces the same card.

1. Open the Translator tab.
2. Type one word and submit. MemDecks returns the translation, an image, a transliteration where the script needs one, and audio where it exists.
3. Press Save. The word becomes a card in your collection.

If you do not know which word to add next, press Next word instead of typing. That is the pump: MemDecks proposes the next unseen word from the topic packs you are subscribed to, in difficulty order. You can save it, or skip it and get another.

Option 3: a ready-made deck

The Decks tab holds decks MemDecks publishes, grouped by theme. Adding one copies its words into your collection as cards in a single action, which is the quickest way to reach the card count a game requires.

1. Open the Decks tab.
2. Pick a deck and add it.
3. The cards appear in your collection, and are immediately usable by every game.

Ready-made deck import requires an account. A guest session cannot import a ready-made deck as of 2 September 2026 — see pricing for the full list of guest limits.

Option 4: import from Anki (beta)

If you already study vocabulary in Anki, MemDecks reads an exported .apkg package and turns its notes into cards. The feature is labelled beta in the app because deck layouts in the wild vary enormously and not every note type maps cleanly onto a MemDecks card.

1. In Anki, export the deck as an .apkg file.
2. In MemDecks, open Decks → Import from Anki and upload the file.
3. Review what MemDecks matched, then confirm.

How many words before something happens

Games declare how many cards they need, and MemDecks hides a game until your collection can fill it. The lowest bar is three cards; the most common is ten.

Two Phrase Builder lessons, or one ready-made deck, is enough to open every game. The full list, with what each one practises, is on the games page.