The lepochi blog

How the app teaches, and why it works the way it does.

• The model was fluent, confident, and wrong
  I asked a local language model which Portuguese words trip up Spanish speakers. It told me the Spanish word "no" means "night". Three rewrites later the fix was to stop asking it questions it couldn't answer — and keep asking the one it could.
• Teaching a diffusion model to remember one face
  Claudia posts a photo from her travels every morning, generated on a box in my house with no GPU. Getting her to be the same person twice took four failed attempts and turned up three bugs that were silently undoing the work.
• Meet Lepochi — the ragdoll cat who runs the app
  Our mascot is a real cat. He naps on my keyboard, watches me type, and now wears a 学 bandana so he can do the same for you. Here's why we put a cat in the corner of every screen.
• Mnemonics that don't ask you to picture anything
  Around 3-4% of people can't form mental images — including our founder. Classical vocabulary mnemonics rely on imagery those learners can't generate. Here's the alternative we built, and why it's better for everyone.
• Launching Lepochi — language learning that actually sticks
  Why we built a multilingual learning platform around tones, harsh feedback, and short daily sessions — and why those three things matter more than streak counters.
• Tones aren't impossible — our delayed-check approach
  Most apps grade tones the moment you tap. We don't. Here's why a two-card delay between hearing a word and proving you remember it produces dramatically better tone recall.
• Spaced repetition, but harsh on purpose
  We use FSRS like everyone else, but we tuned the grading to be stricter than the default. Here's why being soft on yourself is the fastest way to forget what you "learned.
• 13 game modes, one goal — keep showing up
  Each of our 13 game modes targets a specific kind of recall. Here's why we built them — and how playing the wrong mode at the wrong time can actually hurt your retention.
• Streaks, XP, and the science of staying motivated
  Streaks are powerful and easy to abuse. Here's how we use them — and why we cap the daily XP grind so the app rewards learning, not playing the app.