Generic vocabulary quizzes test words a course designer picked for a general audience. A personalized quiz built from your own saved vocabulary tests exactly the words you have actually encountered, tapped, and are trying to remember - which is a far more relevant and efficient use of quiz time. Here is how to actually set one up and use it well.
Why Generic Quizzes Waste Time
A standard vocabulary quiz for your target language and level includes words chosen for a broad, hypothetical learner - some you already know well, some you have never encountered and have no context for, and only a fraction that are genuinely useful review for you specifically. Time spent on words you already know or have no context for is time not spent reviewing the words you are actually trying to retain.
How Your Saved Words Get There in the First Place
As you read books, articles, or web pages in TransLearn and tap-translate unfamiliar words, each one gets saved automatically to your personal dictionary - no manual list-building required. This saved list is the raw material every personalized quiz draws from, so the more you read and tap-translate, the more material quiz mode has to work with.
Creating a Quiz From Your Saved List
Open TransLearn and go to your vocabulary list, where every word you have tapped while reading is stored. From there, switch to Quiz mode: the app pulls directly from this saved list rather than asking you to build a separate deck or manually select words. Quiz mode generates a session on the spot from whichever words are due for review, prioritizing recently added ones over words you have already answered correctly multiple times.
Focusing a Session on Specific Words
If you want to concentrate on a particular batch - words from a book you just finished, or ones you keep getting wrong - filter or sort your saved list before starting the quiz so the session pulls from that narrower set rather than your entire history. This is useful right after finishing a chapter or article, when a specific cluster of new words is still fresh and worth reinforcing immediately.
Why Context Improves Quiz Performance
Memory research consistently shows that recall improves when new information connects to something you already have a mental hook for. A word you tapped while reading a specific scene in a book has a hook - the scene itself - that a randomly assigned vocabulary word from a generic list does not. Quizzing on your own saved words leverages this hook automatically, since every word already has a personal encounter attached to it.
Managing a Growing Word List
As your saved vocabulary grows into the hundreds, quizzing on the entire list at once becomes unwieldy. Focus quiz sessions on recently added words, where retention is still fragile and most in need of reinforcement, while relying on lock-screen widgets and notifications for lighter, ongoing exposure to older, more established vocabulary.
Making This a Regular Practice
A short, personalized quiz session a few times a week keeps pace with new words entering your saved list from ongoing reading, without letting the backlog grow so large that quizzing starts to feel like a chore rather than a quick, useful check-in on what you have actually retained.