A fix for Senza domande. On the card that asks you to write the word in Italian, the answer was showing a piece of placeholder text instead of the word itself. It now shows the word, and the same card in Ripasso is fixed too.

Scroll instead of tapping. Every drill is now a feed: one card per screen, swipe up for the next. The exercises are the same, but you move through them the way you move through anything else on a phone. And a way to stop being asked. Tap "Senza domande" on any card and the questions stop — the card stays, with its answer already filled in and the right option marked, so you can read it and move on when you are ready. Nothing advances by itself. Tap it again to go back to answering. It is there for the evenings when you want to go over a unit without being tested on it, so it records that you met the words and deliberately leaves your review schedule alone. Three new units on the thing most people get wrong. Gli Articoli, I Partitivi and Le Preposizioni Articolate: il and lo and l', dei and delle, al and alla and nei. Each one is a complete set, and there is a new kind of card for them — one noun with the article missing and four articles to choose from, so the article is what you are actually choosing. Every other exercise in the app offers you four different words, which means you can get them all right and still not know whether it is lo zaino or il zaino. The definitions in those units explain the rule rather than the word: you already know what a book is, what you need is why it takes il. Clearer about what you have already done. Each phase now says how many of its words you have been through, and each unit says how far you have taken it. "9/12 parole · 3/5 fasi" rather than a number with nothing to compare it to — so coming back to a unit after a few days, you can see where you left off instead of guessing.

Thirty-four new units. Parola now has 55 units and 3,836 words. Most of what is new sits at B1: technology and the phone, the office and its paperwork, the pharmacy, arguing a point and conceding one, going out, presenting an idea, the night sky, the history of religion, giving and receiving a compliment, a transport strike, the gym, and the documents Italy asks you for. Every new word carries its definition in Italian as well as English, written to explain rather than translate. "Interview" does not tell you that un colloquio is specifically the conversation in which you are being judged, and there is no English word at all for una fascia di garanzia, the hours a strike has to keep the buses running. You can now drill only the words you got wrong, or only the ones you skipped. Those are different kinds of not knowing and they deserve different practice. Typing an answer no longer needs a button hidden behind the keyboard, a swipe skips a card, and going back returns you to where you were in the list. A few recordings had been speaking years incorrectly — 1302 came out as "three hundred and two". They say the right year now.

Cleaner recordings. Around seven hundred words had a faint extra sound just before the word began — a click or a fragment left over from how the recording was cut. It was small, but on a word you are trying to learn to hear, small matters. Those are now clean.

Better pronunciation. Several hundred word recordings have been re-made. Some were cut short before the word finished, and a few carried a stray sound at the start; both are fixed. Reviewing a word now plays the word itself rather than an example sentence, and you can tap the sentence to hear it separately. A drill that shows a definition no longer reads the answer aloud before you have answered it.