What is Shabdah?
Shabdah (PTW) was inspired by a simple idea: how do we enable anyone from any part of the world to learn thousands of words by associating them with pictures?
This led to creating an intuitive learning method which combines illustrations, text, and audio.
The goal of PTW is to make vocabulary easier to understand, recognise, and recall by presenting concepts alongside matching illustrations.
How you can use it
There are four ways in, and they share one deck and one set of progress.
- As a visual dictionary. Look any concept up, in any script, and get its illustration, audio, meanings, related words and example sentences. Free, permanently, with no account needed just to browse.
- As flashcards. Save what you want to keep and review it on a spaced-repetition schedule, with your own notes and categories.
- As a browser extension, while you read. Hover a word on any page and its card appears without leaving the article.
- On a phone or tablet, where extensions can't run at all. Add the site to your home screen and look words up by pasting, sharing from another app, or tapping through a passage in Reader Mode.
Where we are now
5,000 illustrated concepts in Japanese, Hindi and French, each translated into English — Japanese → English, Hindi → English, French → English. Every one of them carries its illustration, its meanings, and recorded audio in all four languages — not synthesised on the fly, but generated once and shipped. Meanings, translations, and every conjugated/inflected word form are native-speaker- sourced, never machine-generated. Example sentences are a mix: real, human-written sentences wherever one exists, and carefully audited AI-generated sentences filling the rest — see Sources & Licenses for exactly which is which and how the generated ones are reviewed. About half the concepts carry related words too; that one is still filling in, and What's included says where it stands. Sixteen categories cover everyday life, and one of them — Grammar — holds the function words no single picture can carry: pronouns, postpositions, question words, negation, chosen for whether they exist across many of the world's languages rather than for how common they are in English.
Beyond the illustrated concepts there are Situations, thirty illustrated dialogue scenarios, and a dictionary fallback in all four languages for words PTW doesn't teach. Everything can be downloaded for offline use, by category or all at once.
The design deliberately does not treat English as the default source language: every language is studiable from any other, rather than everything routing through English. More language pairs will follow, and the concept library, illustrations, audio and learning features keep growing. This release lets us gather feedback while that happens — What's included keeps an honest, current account of what works today and what doesn't yet.
Your insights and support are critical in helping us to scale PTW in a way that always ensures a high quality educational experience.
Thank you for joining us at the beginning of this journey. We hope Shabdah becomes a trusted companion throughout your language-learning experience.