One meaning, one card

In Riff, run the verb and run the noun are different cards. So are the many senses of set, get and take. A word card teaches one meaning at a time, with its own pictures, definitions and examples.

There is an uncomfortable fact behind that choice: the words you will meet most often are exactly the ones with the most meanings. Vocabulary research has a name for what a word costs to learn, the learning burden, and packing a dozen senses into one dictionary-style entry quietly maximizes it. Learners who know one sense of a word also tend to force that sense onto sentences where it does not fit, and feel fluent while misreading.

Splitting by sense keeps each card honest. One picture can genuinely match one meaning, one example can genuinely demonstrate it, and your progress gets tracked per sense instead of per spelling, so knowing run as in jogging never counts as knowing run as in managing a business.

What makes this practical is language technology: before a card exists, Riff reads the episode’s language and works out which sense every line is using. The pedagogy is old. The automation is what lets it scale to a whole TV catalog.