Getting Started

Overview

This guide walks you through the essentials, from creating your account to finishing your first study session. By the end, you'll have a deck ready to study, a handle on how spaced repetition schedules your reviews, and a feel for the app's main pages.

Creating Your Account

You have two options for signing up: using an email and password (credentials) or by using your Google account.

Email Signup

Head to the signup page and enter your email and password. Once you submit the form, you'll get a verification email at the address you provided. Click the link in that email to verify your account. You'll be signed in automatically and land in the app, ready to finish setting up your profile on the onboarding page. A short welcome email arrives right after verification with a few pointers on getting started.

If you try to use Dialect before verifying your email, you'll land on a "Verify your email" page instead of the app. That's by design: if you typo'd your email at signup, you wouldn't be able to reset your password later, so we block access until the address is verified. From that page you can resend the verification email, change your email if you typo'd it, or sign out.

Your password needs to meet a few requirements to keep your account secure:

• At least 8 characters
• At least one uppercase letter
• At least one lowercase letter
• At least one number
• At least one special character

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Google Signup

Click "Continue with Google" on the login or signup page to sign in using your Google account. After selecting your account, you'll land in the app. Because Google already verifies your email on its end, you skip Dialect's verification step. A short welcome email arrives right after signup with a few pointers on getting started.

If you already have an account with the same email address, your Google account gets linked automatically, allowing you to use either sign-in method going forward. Alternatively, if you set up a Google account first, you can later set a password to enable credentials login.

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Forgot Password

Forgot your password? It happens. Here's how to reset it:

1. Click "Forgot password?" on the login page.
2. Enter your email address and submit.
3. Check your inbox for a reset link.
4. Click the link and enter a new password (same requirements as above).
5. Sign in with your new password on the login page.

Setting Up Your Profile

The first time you sign in, you'll land on the onboarding page. This is where you pick a username, set your location, and optionally upload a profile photo.

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Username

Your username shows up on your profile, on the leaderboards, and on your forum posts. It needs to be between 3 and 15 characters and can only use letters, numbers, and underscores. As you type, the app checks availability in real time so you'll know right away if your first choice is taken.

Location

The app tries to guess your country from your IP address and pre-fills it for you, but you can change it to any country using the dropdown. There is also a "Show on profile" toggle if you'd rather keep your location private. Either way, you can revisit this later in Settings > Account.

Profile Photo

Uploading a photo is optional. If you add one, it'll show up next to your name throughout the app. If you don't, a placeholder is used instead. You can add or change your photo any time in Settings > Account.

Your Trial Period

After creating an account and completing onboarding, you get a 30-day free trial with full access to everything. A small banner in the app header keeps track of how many days you have left.

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Three days before your trial ends, we'll send a reminder email with a link to subscribe. If you decide Dialect isn't for you, no action is needed: the trial will simply end and your account will switch to read-only. The day after your trial ends, we'll send a short email explaining what happens next and how to pick back up; you can view decks, review progress, and export your data at any time, and studying resumes the moment you subscribe.

When the trial ends, you will need to purchase a subscription to keep studying, chatting with the AI tutor, posting in the forum, or using study groups. You'll still be able to view your decks, your progress, and export your data without a subscription, but many other actions are paywalled. Full details are in Settings > Subscription.

Navigating the App

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Sidebar

The sidebar on the left is your main navigation. It's organized into logical sections so you can find what you need quickly:

Header

In the header at the top of the page, a bell icon shows a badge with your unread notification count; click it to open a dropdown of your recent notifications. Next to the bell is your user menu with links to your profile, your settings, and a button to sign out.

Theme

At the bottom of the sidebar, you can switch between Light, Dark, and System themes. System follows your device's theme preference, so if your OS is set to switch themes automatically at sunset, the app will follow along.

The Dashboard

The dashboard is the first page you see after logging in, and it's designed to give you a snapshot of where you are in your studies. It pulls information from your decks, your sessions, your progress, and your recent chats into a single view.

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Language Filter

If you're studying multiple languages at once, the language filter at the top of the dashboard lets you focus on just one. Pick a language from the dropdown and every card below updates to show data for only that language. Switch back to "All languages" any time to see the full picture.

Today's Progress

A card near the top of the dashboard shows six metrics for today at a glance: sessions completed, points earned, cards learned, cards reviewed, time studied, and your current streak. This is your quick "how am I doing today?" check.

Daily Goals

If you've set daily goals for any of your decks, this section shows your overall progress toward today's goals across all of them. Click "View all" to open a detailed breakdown that shows each individual deck's goal and whether or not it has been met.

Daily goals are set per deck rather than globally and are configured in the deck's settings tab. See Settings > Per-Deck Settings for details.

Weekly Trend

Further down the dashboard, a bar chart shows cards studied per day over the last 7 days. Today's bar is highlighted so you can see at a glance whether you're ahead of, behind, or on pace with your recent activity.

Study Recommendations

Not sure what to study next? The dashboard has two recommendation cards to help you decide.

The "Review" card surfaces decks that have cards due for spaced repetition review. Decks with unmet daily goals appear first, followed by the rest sorted by how many cards are due (most due cards at the top).

The "Learn" card does the same thing but for new cards you haven't seen yet. Decks with unmet daily goals come first, then the rest sorted by how many new cards are available.

Each card shows a primary "Up next" recommendation with a paginated list of additional options below it. Click a deck to see session details before you commit to starting the session.

Resume Session

Left a study session unfinished? A "Resume session" chip appears in the dashboard header when you have an active session waiting. Click it to see the deck, the mode, and your progress, then choose whether to resume where you left off or end the session.

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Recent Chats

The three most recent chat conversations appear toward the bottom of the dashboard, filtered by the language you've selected in the language filter. Click any of them to jump back in.

Creating Your First Deck

A deck is a collection of flashcards organized around a topic or a language. What follows is a quick overview to get you making cards immediately. For the full details on everything decks can do, see Decks.

1. Click "Create Deck" from the sidebar or from the Decks page.
2. Give your deck a name (something like "Spanish Basics" works).
3. Pick the base language (the one you already know) and the target language (the one you're learning).
4. Optionally add a description, a cover image, and choose whether the deck is public or private.
5. Click "Create".

You will then be redirected to the deck editor where you can add cards, sections, and custom fields and build your decks however you'd like.

Adding Cards

Each card has a front (the word or phrase in your target language) and a back (the translation in your base language). That's the basic structure, but decks can also have custom fields for extra information like part of speech, gender, or example sentences. For details on custom fields, see Decks > Custom Fields.

To add your first card:

1. Click "Add Card" at the bottom of a section to create a new card row.
2. Type the front text in the first field.
3. Type the back text in the second field. Cards save automatically when you click away.
4. Repeat.

Tip: Already have cards in a spreadsheet, Anki deck, or JSON file? You can bulk import them instead of typing each one. See Decks > Bulk Import for supported formats and details.

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Your First Study Session

With cards in your deck, you're ready to study. Here's the short version. For a deep dive into all five study modes, test types, and scoring, see Studying.

1. On the Decks page, click "Study" on your deck's card. You can also click "Study" from the deck overview page.
2. In the mode selection modal, click "Learn", the best mode for brand-new cards. Your session starts right away.

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A Learn session has two phases, the first of which is the learn phase where you see each card's front and back so you can get familiar with the material. You can optionally mark cards as "Known" to skip ahead on things you already know, or "Difficult" to flag cards you would like to set aside and study separately in the "Difficult" mode.

After the learn phase comes the test phase, where you work through a mix of multiple-choice, typing, and listening questions for each card. Which types appear depends on your settings. Failing a test will show you the card you answered incorrectly so that you can review it before continuing with testing. When all the tests are done, you are redirected to the session complete screen, which shows your points earned, your accuracy, and a card-by-card review of how you did.

Once a session wraps up, each card gets scheduled for a future review based on how well you did on it. Cards you struggled with come back sooner, whereas cards you knew and did well on come back later. Over time, this spacing helps you retain material much more efficiently than cramming would.

Your First Chat

The AI tutor is there to help you practice conversation, get grammar corrections, and quiz yourself on vocabulary from your decks. Below is a quick explanation on how to get started. For the full picture, including how deck context works and how to generate cards from conversations, see Chat.

1. Click "Chat" in the sidebar to navigate to the Chat page.
2. Pick your target language from the language picker.
3. Optionally attach a deck as context. If you do, the tutor will pull vocabulary from that deck naturally into the conversation.
4. Type a message and press Enter.

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Tips and Troubleshooting

Verification email never arrived? Check your spam or promotions folder first. If it isn't there, you can resend the verification email from Settings > Account. Google signups don't need email verification, so skip this step if you used "Continue with Google".

Signed up with Google but want to log in with email too? Set a password in Settings > Account after signing in with Google. Once a password is set, both methods work on the same account going forward. If you already had a credential account with the same email, signing in with Google links automatically without a separate step.

"Subscription required" prompt appeared? Your free trial runs for 30 days from account creation. After it ends, studying, AI chat, posting to the forum, and creating or editing decks all require an active subscription. Subscribe from Settings > Subscription to restore access. You can still view your decks, progress, and exports while inactive.

What's Next

You've got the basics. From here, the rest of the docs walk you through each feature in depth.

• Decks covers creating, editing, importing, and browsing community decks.
• Studying goes deep on the four study modes, test types, and how spaced repetition actually works.
• Chat explains deck context, vocab highlighting, card generation, and bring-your-own-key setup.
• Progress is your home for activity heatmaps, goals, and session history.
• Leaderboard is where the competition lives.
• Forum is for community discussions organized by language.
• Study Groups lets you study together with shared decks and group leaderboards.
• Profile is your public presence on the platform.
• Notifications keeps you updated on activity across the app.
• Settings is where you customize everything.