What is it?
Unda turns a reading text into a practice route: its vocabulary, its forms, its sentence parts. While you practise, the text writes itself out beside you — line by line it grows in your book. Once the book is full, you can read it. Unda is not a quick mode, it’s a project: you can stop whenever you like, your place is kept, and next time you carry on where you left off.
The name comes from the drop that hollows the stone — gutta cavat lapidem. Not by force, but because it keeps falling.
What do I practise here?
Everything this one text asks of you — and nothing else. Unda builds its tasks from the sentences in front of you rather than from a general pool: the words that turn up in the next sentence; the form this sentence actually carries; the sentence part it hangs on. That’s why it doesn’t feel like a training plan but like working through a text — except that the work is broken into cards.
How do I practise here?
There are two doors: the Unda tile on the home screen — it takes you straight back into the text you last worked on — and the “Practise this text” button in the reading library, when you have a particular text in front of you.
- Four or five words as a run-up. Before the first sentence arrives, you meet the words that are about to be needed.
- Then blocks of four sentences. Mixed within them: vocabulary, forms, sentence parts and marking cards.
- Correct cards fill the book. After a few right answers another line of the text appears — how many cards a line costs is worked out from the length of the text.
- What waits at the end is a door, not a barrier. Once the text is done you can read it in one piece — but you don’t have to. The reading library was open all along.
Features
- Cards from the sentence, not from a pool: word, form, sentence part and marking all come out of the text you are working through.
- Marking cards: you circle a sentence part with a pen or your finger instead of just tapping it — you draw the boundary yourself.
- The book: the text grows visibly alongside you, Latin on the left, the translation on the right. The counter never goes backwards — a mistake simply doesn’t count.
- Interruptible: Unda remembers where you were. A text takes several sessions, and that is by design.
- Every sentence is voiced — you can have whatever you’re working on read out to you.
- It counts towards your progress: vocabulary boxes, forms progress and grammar all move when you practise in Unda.
What does the support look like?
Help is available on every card: look up the meaning of a word, have a form broken down, have the sentence part shown to you. And it costs you nothing — if you reach the right answer with help, you have solved the card. If you tap wrongly first and correct yourself afterwards, you have not. The rule behind it is one sentence:
Asking is free. Guessing isn’t.
A card you got wrong comes back within the same round — but in a different mode. So you don’t get the identical question served up again; you get the same matter from another side.
What about the dyslexia support here?
In Unda too, the sentence parts keep their fixed colour — subject blue, predicate red, accusative object indigo. A sentence part always stays one connected block and is never broken across the middle. The OpenDyslexic font and the wider letter spacing stay active, every sentence can be read aloud, and on a tablet you can write the form cards with a pen instead of typing.
Above all: there is no time pressure and no streak. Unda is a project — whether you practise for ten minutes or forty makes no difference to your place being kept. Anyone who needs a break loses nothing.
How do I learn here?
Technically: Unda keeps only a handful of cards in the air at any one time and moves each of them through three stations. A right answer moves a card one station on, a wrong one moves it straight back — not only on the second mistake. The gaps between repetitions grow as it goes: first after a few cards, then after about eight, then after roughly twenty. Once a card has been safe three times it is gone and a new one takes its place. What is learned is always the individual form, not the word as a whole: venit and venerat are two cards, because they ask two different things of you.
Scientifically: three well-documented findings sit inside this sequence. First, actively retrieving something anchors it far better than reading it again (the testing effect, Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Second, spreading repetitions out over time beats cramming them into one session (the spacing effect, Cepeda et al., 2006) — which is exactly why Unda is designed for several sessions rather than one run. Third, mixing types of task instead of practising them in blocks feels harder and still carries further (interleaving, Bjork, 1994). And because every card comes from the same text, each word and each form stands in a context from the outset, rather than alone on a flashcard.
Common questions
Is Unda the same as Turbo?
No. Turbo revises what you already know, cutting across all the modules — a fast round in between. Unda works through a text you don’t know yet, and takes several sessions to do it. Turbo is a session, Unda is a project.
Do I have to finish a text in one go?
No, and it isn’t built for that. A text consists of many short blocks; you stop when you want to, and the next time you open it you find exactly the place you left.
Why is there no Unda button on Cicero or Caesar?
Unda currently runs on our own Lapicida reading texts. So there is no Unda button on the original authors — and no padlock either, because there is nothing to unlock there. The texts themselves are of course available to read in the reading library.
Can I try Unda without the full version?
Yes. The first reading text of the first year is free — with everything that belongs to it, Unda included. The full version opens the whole library.
Do I need a pen for the marking cards?
No, a finger will do. On a tablet with a pen it is more precise; on a computer with a mouse the app hides the pen functions rather than offering something unusable.
Try it now
The first reading text is free — open it and tap “Practise this text”. Start for free →
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