READ FIRST

Collecting words looks like collecting. It is closer to reserving a seat for your mouth. Twenty cards that say 눈 = eye / snow almost never appear at a table. A line with a scene — “버스 놓쳐서 결국 걸어갔어요.” — is what shows up next week. The seat is the memory, not the gloss. A word with no seat will pass a quiz and vanish in a line at a counter. The failure is usually the same shape. Twenty new items a day, a gloss skimmed with the eyes, misses deleted so the deck stays pretty. The miss is the expensive signal: this one is not yours yet. Three to five new expressions. Cover the meaning and say them once. If today’s pile passes ten, skip adding. Do not confuse the pleasure of the save button with skill. Retrieval count is skill. If the list is already broken, do not open a fresh app. Pick ten cards with no sentence, give each a line, and leave the other two hundred closed. A week of hunting a nicer tool loses to those ten minutes. Looking things up is only the doorway. Five flips before sleep and today’s doorway is closed.