Raider Vocab
Vocabulary practice · Spanish · French · Mandarin · Latin
Learn your vocab list in 10 minutes a day
Your teacher posts a link in Canvas. Open it, press Start today’s practice, and Raider Vocab does the rest:
- Meet each new word: see it, hear it, say it out loud.
- Pick its meaning, then type it with the accents, the way the quiz asks.
- Come back tomorrow. Words you know return just before you would forget them.
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Teachers
Paste a list from Quizlet, Excel or Word and get a link for Canvas. Takes a minute.
Tap a word to hear it and see its meaning.
Latin teacher? Verba fills in principal parts and drills every form from its dictionary. Raider Vocab is for simple word-and-meaning lists.
Other ways to practise
How do I type the accents?
Show my teacher my progress
Makes a short code you can paste into a Canvas assignment. It shows how many words are solid and how many days you practised this week. Nothing is sent anywhere.
My lists
Saved on this laptop only. Mixing old lists into today’s review keeps last month’s words from fading.
Make a list and share it in Canvas
Getting your list in
- From Quizlet: open the set, choose … › Export, keep “Tab” and “New line”, copy, paste below.
- From Excel: select the word and meaning columns, copy, paste. A third column of example sentences becomes fill-in-the-gap practice.
- Typed by hand: one per line,
la playa - the beachorla playa = the beach. - Mandarin: characters, pinyin and English in any order:
你好 ni3 hao3 hello.
bonito/a, el/la estudiante and levantar(se) accept every form they stand for. Use ; between two different answers.
Check progress codes
Students can make a code from “Show my teacher my progress.” Paste any number of them here, from a Canvas assignment, a Form export or a Teams thread. Everything else in the text is ignored.
Why Raider Vocab works the way it does
Every choice below follows the research on learning vocabulary in a second language. Where the research says something surprising, the tool follows the research, not what feels productive.
Trying to remember beats looking again.
Pulling a word out of memory, even failing, makes it stick far better than re-reading it. Second-language studies show the same thing: giving learners chances to retrieve a new word raises how many they learn.
Built in: almost every step asks before it tells. Answers are shown only after a try.
Space it out across days.
Spacing is the biggest single lever in flashcard learning, bigger than how many words you study at once. Short daily sessions beat one long cram.
Built in: correct words come back after 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days; missed words come back tomorrow. Free practice never pushes a word further out, because cramming is not spacing.
Meet a word before you have to produce it.
Forcing learners to write a brand-new word, or a sentence with it, the first time they see it can reduce learning: the effort goes into writing, not into fixing the word’s form and meaning.
Built in: a new word is only seen, heard and said aloud. Typing comes later in the same session and on later days.
Climb from recognising to producing.
Recognising a meaning is the easier first step for linking form and meaning; typing the word yourself is what builds spelling and the ability to use it. Learning in the productive direction (English → Spanish) builds more of what students need for speaking and writing.
Built in: each word moves from pick the meaning, to type the meaning, to type the word, then to hear it and type it and fill the gap in a sentence.
Practise the way you will be tested.
Memory works best when practice matches the test. RJ vocab quizzes are typed in LockDown Browser with accents counted, and most game tools practise multiple choice.
Built in: typed answers on the US-International keyboard, accent-by-accent feedback (“right word, the ó counts”), articles that carry gender, tones for Mandarin, and a “Quiz me like the real quiz” round.
Hear many voices.
Learners remember new words better when they hear them from several speakers and at different speeds, and hearing different regional accents helps too.
Built in: the audio rotates through every Spanish, French or Mandarin voice on the laptop (Spain, Mexico, US Spanish; France and Canada) and varies the speed. The studies were with older students and adults; for very young children extra voices can slow learning down.
Mix old and new; don’t drill look-alike sets.
Words learned in tight sets of near-synonyms or one category (all the colours, all the fruit) interfere with each other. The evidence is mixed, but spacing them out reduces the interference.
Built in: words are shuffled, new words arrive in fours among reviews, and My lists mixes every saved list into one review.
Memory tricks: helpful, with a catch.
The keyword method (link the sound of a word to an image) gives a fast early boost, but those words can be forgotten faster unless they keep being reviewed. Hooks you make yourself work better than ones you are given.
Built in: a “memory hook” box appears only for words a student keeps missing, and the hook comes back with the word in later reviews.
Flashcards are one strand, not the whole course.
A balanced language course splits time roughly four ways: listening and reading for meaning, speaking and writing for meaning, deliberate study of the language (this tool), and fluency practice. Deliberate study should be about a quarter of the time, not all of it.
Built in: sessions are short on purpose. Reading and listening a lot is where fluency comes from; this handles the words that make the reading possible.
Sources
- Karpicke & Roediger (2008), The critical importance of retrieval for learning, Science. Barcroft (2007), Effects of opportunities for word retrieval during second language vocabulary learning, Language Learning 57.
- Cepeda et al. (2006), distributed practice meta-analysis. Nakata (2015), expanding vs. equal spacing, SSLA 37. Nakata & Webb (2016), part vs. whole learning, SSLA 38. Nakata (2017), within-session repeated retrieval, SSLA.
- Barcroft (2004), sentence writing and L2 lexical acquisition, Second Language Research 20. Barcroft (2006), Can writing a new word detract from learning it?, SLR 22. Barcroft (2007), word and fragment writing, Foreign Language Annals 40. Webb & Piasecki (2018) on when writing does help.
- Nakata (2013), Optimising second language vocabulary learning from flashcards (retrieval formats). Webb (2005, 2009) on receptive vs. productive learning of word pairs.
- Morris, Bransford & Franks (1977), transfer-appropriate processing.
- Barcroft & Sommers (2005), Effects of acoustic variability on second language vocabulary learning, SSLA 27. Sommers & Barcroft (2007), speaking-rate variability. Fichtner, Barcroft, Sommers et al. (2025), sociophonetic variability, SSLA. Sinkeviciute et al. (2019) on younger learners.
- Tinkham (1993, 1997) and Erten & Tekin (2008) on semantic clustering; Nakata & Suzuki on massing, spacing and related words.
- Wang, Thomas & Ouellette (1992), keyword mnemonic and long-term retention, Journal of Educational Psychology 84.
- Nation (2007), The four strands, Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching.