# Story – KYW

KYW grew out of a personal problem.

_https://keepyourwords.org/en/about/history_

The founder of this site – that is, I – have spent years learning languages, English above all. It is one of the most useful skills I have managed to acquire and, at the same time, one of the hardest. Luckily I met a wonderful teacher, and I owe much of my progress to her.

She held that no language can be learned without a certain volume of practice: you have to read and listen a great deal, and meet the same constructions again and again in different contexts. One of the best ways of creating that practice, she said, was working with texts. The approach did help, though calling it pleasant would be a stretch.

We would find essays, passages from books and monologues, and then go through them together: picking out the unfamiliar words, pinning down their meanings, adding new vocabulary – after which I learned the texts by heart. Words appeared in my dictionary not because I had decided in advance to learn twenty new ones, but because I had met them in living language.

That is exactly why I decided that packs on my site should carry texts wherever possible. They let you see new vocabulary in context instead of just running your eye down a list of separate words.

In time I noticed another problem: even well-learned words fade little by little. You cannot keep going back to everything you have covered – you have to move on, read new material and take on the next topics.

I started looking for a tool that would help me keep the vocabulary and come back to it without extra manual work. In no app did I find everything I needed. So I built Keep Your Words – a site that became part of my own study and helps me develop the language systematically. It fitted into my daily practice and became an inseparable part of it.

I hope KYW will help you, too, keep the words you meet as you learn a language.

What KYW differs in, and what it deliberately leaves undone, is set out separately in the section “How KYW compares”.