How the Verbomatico method works

It starts with a song you already like

A language course starts with a syllabus. Verbomatico starts with a song, and the song becomes the syllabus: its own vocabulary, its own verb tenses, its own idioms, its own register. That sounds like a small difference. It is not. The reason most vocabulary lists fail is not that they are wrong — it is that nobody wants to read them twice, and the second reading is where learning happens.

The catalog covers six languages and runs from 1947 to 2026, and it grows. You pick one song. From that moment everything you are asked comes out of that song, so the repetition costs you nothing: you were going to listen to it again anyway.

Five study sections per song

Each song card is divided into five sections, scored separately, so you can see which part of the language you are weak in rather than just a single overall number:

• Vocabulary — the words the song actually uses, studied with meaning, synonym and antonym rather than a single translation.
• Verbs — the tenses the song is written in, and what changes when the person or the time changes.
• Grammar — varied questions built from the rest of the lyric — agreement, prepositions, word order, articles.
• Expressions — the fixed phrases and idioms, the part a dictionary tends to hide.
• Comprehension — what the song is saying, which is a different skill from knowing what each word means.

Every question is written for that specific song and reviewed by a person before it goes live. Nothing is generic filler dropped into every card.

Four speed rounds

Reading a word once teaches you to recognise it. Producing it under time pressure is what makes it available when you speak. Training is the second layer: timed rounds where you tap the right translation before the clock runs out. It opens at six seconds a word and tightens to two and a half. You get three lives, and a streak multiplies what you earn. There are four of them:

• Vocabulary — the core words of the song.
• Adjectives — the describing words on their own — the fastest way to stop sounding flat in a new language.
• Combos — two-to-four-word chunks exactly as the song says them, because fluent speakers store language in chunks, not word by word.
• Expressions — the idioms, cut into short pieces you can actually reuse.

Across those four rounds the catalog currently holds 3415 distinct study entries, each translated into the five languages that are not the song’s own.

Scores, mastery and your level

Each play updates that card’s score in that section. A card you have worked through is worth more, both as a study record and inside the game economy: cards can be sold and traded, and the price follows the score. Coins come from playing, and they buy new songs, so progress feeds progress.

Your own level is not something you declare at sign-up. It is calculated as the average CEFR grade of the ten cards you have mastered most, so it moves as your collection moves, and it is shown on your profile.

Playing against other people

Duels are six questions head-to-head with twelve seconds each. Battles run five rounds. War is turn-based, and the winner takes a card from the loser. None of it teaches you anything the solo sections do not — its job is to get you to open the app on a day when you would not have studied, which over a month is worth more than any clever exercise.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not publish lyrics or audio. Lyrics are never displayed in the app, and playback goes out to YouTube or Spotify; titles, lyrics and recordings belong to their owners. Our study material is original, and where a fragment of a song has to appear at all it is kept to a few words. That constraint shaped the product: it is the reason Combos are short chunks rather than whole lines.

A fifteen-minute session

If you want a routine that works, this is the one we would suggest:

1. Watch the video once without doing anything else. Just listen.
2. Play the five sections of the card. Expect to be wrong in Expressions — that is the point of it.
3. Run one speed round. Adjectives or Combos if the vocabulary already feels comfortable.
4. Finish with a duel against someone learning the same song.

Do that with one song until its score stops moving, then take the next one. Ten songs done properly will teach you more than a hundred opened once.