Download for iOSGet the most out of Stacks: add the words worth remembering
Montaña
Volcán
Estratovolcán
The Spanish dictionary holds more than ninety thousand words. You don't need to add them all, and you wouldn't want to. A small core does most of the work, and that's where Stacks earns its keep. Here's how to pick the words worth adding so your daily review stays short and high-value.
Some words carry more weight than others
Words aren't used equally. In Spanish, the thousand most frequent words make up the bulk of everyday conversation, and the first few thousand cover most of what you'll read. The long tail of rarer words still matters, but each one shows up so rarely that learning it from a flashcard gives you a poor return for the time you spend.
So the question isn't how many words you can cram into the app. It's which words give you the most reach for the least review.
Why adding everything backfires
Every card you add comes back to you again and again. That's the point of spaced repetition, and it's why it works. But it also means each card has an ongoing cost: a few seconds today, a few more next week, and so on for as long as you keep learning. Add hundreds of rare words and your daily review balloons, most of it spent on words you won't meet again for months.
Use Stacks for the words that scaffold
Think of the cards you add as forming a scaffold. You want the key nouns, verbs, and connecting words that hold a topic together, the ones you keep needing in real situations: ordering food, talking about work, describing where you live. These are the words you meet again and again across different settings, so every review pays off quickly.
When you hit a word like that, one you can already feel yourself reaching for in conversation, add it. It'll come back to you often in real life, so the card and the world reinforce each other.
Let the words come to you
The signal isn't how common a word is in the language. It's how often it comes up for you. An uncommon word can be a great card if you keep meeting it: a term from your work, a place you talk about, an interest you keep returning to. Frequency is personal, and the app's at its best for the words that are frequent in your life, common or not.
The thing to watch for is the moment you start hunting. When you find yourself scrolling for something to add, manufacturing cards to fill a Stack, you've probably run past the words that earn their place. The good ones tend to arrive on their own, because you reached for them or kept bumping into them. Let the next useful word find you, then add it.
Let reading fill in the rest
Most of the long tail doesn't need a flashcard at all. Those words arrive on their own once you read and listen enough, each one carried by the sentences around it, and that's fine: they're doing their job in context. Your scaffold of high-value words is what makes that reading possible in the first place, and the rest grows from there. If you want a way to read at your exact level, see our guide on using AI to make graded reading.
Build a Stack that pulls its weight
Stacks turns the words you meet into smart flashcards, with FSRS spaced repetition, romanization, and automatic translations for over 100 languages.
