How it works

Welcome to Shabdah! Our platform combines visual learning, contextual examples, and interactive tools to help you build lasting vocabulary across multiple languages.

Getting Started: Exploring the Visual Dictionary

Shabdah works smoothly across all your devices — laptops, desktops, tablets, and phones. The dictionary is built on illustration rather than translation, helping you connect words directly to concepts and memories.

Start Browsing the Dictionary

1. Learn with Flashcards

Start by exploring our visual flashcards.

Each flashcard includes:

• A carefully designed illustration that represents the concept.
• The word in your target language.
• Its pronunciation.
• The translation in your native language.
• Related words and word forms to expand your vocabulary.

Study the cards at your own pace or review them regularly to strengthen long-term memory.

2. Use the Visual Dictionary

Need to look up a word quickly?

Simply search for any word or concept in the Visual Dictionary.

Each entry brings together:

• A memorable illustration.
• Pronunciation and audio.
• Meanings and translations.
• Related vocabulary.
• Common word forms and inflections.
• Example sentences showing the word used in context.

The Visual Dictionary is designed to help you understand not just what a word means, but how it is used in everyday language.

3. Save Words to Your Review Deck & Custom Flashcards

Found a word you want to commit to memory?

With a single click, tap “Add to Review” to send it straight to your spaced repetition queue.

Your saved words can then be practiced regularly through review sessions. When you create a free account, your progress, review intervals, custom categories, and personal notes automatically sync across all your phones, tablets, and computers.

You can also upload your own photos from your phone or laptop gallery to create personalized custom flashcards, anchoring vocabulary to your own life experiences.

On Phones, Tablets & Desktop

Shabdah works as a responsive Progressive Web App across mobile and desktop browsers.

Install it: open this site in Safari, Chrome, or Edge and choose Add to Home Screen (or install the app from your browser menu). It opens full-screen like a native app, with no browser bars.

What Each Language Covers

Japanese, Hindi and French work the same way across the 5,000 curated concepts, each one studiable in its own direction into English. Every one of those has its illustration, recorded audio, meanings, inflected forms, and related words.

In addition to the 5,000 illustrated concepts, our dictionary includes extensive fallback dictionaries across all four languages for broader vocabulary:

• Japanese falls back to a full dictionary of 432,572 entries, so almost any word you type will return something.
• English falls back to a reverse dictionary of 225,157 entries, giving the Japanese for an English word.
• Hindi falls back to 22,224 headwords, inverted from the FreeDict English–Hindi dictionary, which is built from Shabdanjali — a dictionary released by IIIT Hyderabad but written by volunteer contributors, whose publishers make no claim of uniform quality. Most entries carry an example sentence as well as the translation. Treat it as a reasonable guess rather than a verified one; see Sources & licences.
• French falls back to 55,356 headwords from WOLF, the Wordnet Libre du Français, mapped onto Princeton WordNet — so a French word gives you both its English equivalents and a definition explaining the sense, not just a one-word swap. Like Hindi, this one was assembled automatically rather than compiled by people, so it is right most of the time rather than all of it; see Sources & licences.

These fallbacks are used only for typed search and only for words outside Shabdah's own 5,000 concepts. Those 5,000 were translated and reviewed by people, and nothing above applies to them.

Inflected forms are handled, so you do not have to know the dictionary form before you look something up: mangeons finds manger, heureuse finds heureux, and किताबों finds किताब.

The two fallbacks differ in size for a simple reason: open, freely licensed dictionaries are far larger for Japanese and English than for Hindi. A Hindi word outside both the curated 5,000 and those 22,456 will still come back empty — that is the honest boundary today, and it is worth knowing before you rely on it.

Learn Naturally: Interconnected Semantic Network

Rather than memorising isolated word lists, Shabdah helps you connect images, sounds, meanings, and real-life usage to create stronger, longer-lasting memories.

Whether you're studying with flashcards, searching the Visual Dictionary, or exploring related words and collocations, every interaction builds your vocabulary in a natural and engaging way.

Where things stand

How Shabdah's Content Was Built

Over 10 months, I developed Shabdah’s multilingual linguistic corpus using AI models guided by human-created, human-vetted linguistic resources documented on the Sources & Licences page. Through structured data engineering, semantic mapping, cross-language alignment, morphological analysis and iterative quality assurance, I developed six interconnected content types across 5,000 concepts and three language pairs: meanings, related words, example sentences, collocations, phrases and inflected forms.