Useful Words: a bilingual companion for the moment a sentence stalls.
A writing tool for English-language learners, started in my own classroom and rebuilt, version after version, until it sat where the writing happens.
A student would be halfway through a sentence, then stop.
They had the idea. They lost the next word, the connector that carries a thought forward, and hunting for it broke the sentence.
So the student would leave the document, open a dictionary or a translation app, and look. By the time they came back, the sentence had gone cold. I watched this happen the same way for years, across classroom after classroom of teenagers writing in their second language, and later with students drafting for advanced English proficiency exams.
A dictionary explains the word you already have.
A dictionary is indexed by spelling toward meaning; a writer stuck mid-sentence already has the meaning and needs the move.
The tools my students reached for were built to answer the wrong question. A learner stuck mid-sentence is asking something a dictionary cannot hear: how do I get from this idea to the next one?
The vocabulary they were missing was the vocabulary of moves: the connectors and transitions and set phrases that hold a piece of writing together. Nothing they had was organized that way. So the question I started with was whether you could index words by what a writer is trying to do, rather than by how those words are spelled.
I built every version of it myself.
Three rebuilds, no team, and that limit is why it stayed this specific to the students in front of me.
Across three rebuilds, I did the research, the content, the design, and the front-end myself.
- Observed English-language learners stall mid-sentence, in class, while drafting.
- Interviewed students about where the writing broke down.
- Curated the word lists from my own teaching materials, later grounded in Cambridge exam materials.
- Designed and built each version, from a 2018 desktop app to the current mobile-first site.
- Tested with my own students and folded what I saw straight back in.
I indexed the words by the move a writer makes.
Group words by the job they do in a sentence, and a learner can find a phrase by function instead of guessing its first letter.
The first version, in 2018, was a set of lists grouped by what a writer was trying to do. One list for placing things in time: as soon as, by the time, meanwhile, eventually, prior to. Others for adding, for contrasting, for concluding. A student who knew they needed to carry one idea into the next could find the phrase by its function, without guessing the first letter. Ordering the words by intent made the tool worth opening, and it has survived every rebuild since.
The 2026 version keeps that backbone and layers eight academic topic areas on top, the subjects that come up again and again in proficiency exams, from technology and the environment to work and education. A student writing about one of them now finds the topic vocabulary and the connectors in the same place, in either language.
add
furthermore
in addition
moreover
contrast
however
whereas
even so
sequence
as soon as
meanwhile
eventually
conclude
therefore
in short
to sum up
The interface had to disappear behind the word.
Every screen decision served one test: a student finds the word and its move without having to read an interface first.
The unit is the entry. It carries everything at once, so nothing needs a second tap: the headword, its pronunciation, the part of speech, the English meaning beside the Traditional Chinese gloss, the collocations that show the word in the company it keeps, and one example in both languages. Colour does the wayfinding. Each topic owns a tint, so a student scanning for environment vocabulary follows the green instead of reading headers. Search highlights the matched letters and groups the results by part of speech, so the eye lands on the right form of the word fast.
Two defaults round it out. The tool follows the system into dark mode. And because students draft on their phones, the sidebar folds into a bottom tab bar within thumb reach.
I kept the content curated, even when I let AI help rebuild it.
AI sped up the build. It never wrote the content, because a learner cannot catch a confident, plausible-sounding mistake.
The words came out of teaching. First from the materials I had written for my own classes, then checked against Cambridge exam materials so the vocabulary matched what the exams reward. When I rebuilt the tool under Human in 2026, I used AI to move faster through the build itself. I did not use it to write the content. A learner has no way to tell a real word pairing from a plausible-sounding wrong one, and the cost of a confident mistake lands on the person least able to catch it.
Closing the distance to the writer, one rebuild at a time.
Desktop in 2018, a bigger redesign in 2019, mobile in 2026: each version closed the distance to the moment a sentence stalls.
The 2018 version was a desktop app. You installed it, and it sat in its own window. A redesign in 2019 roughly tripled the content and tidied the interface. The change that took me longest to see had nothing to do with features. My students were not writing at a desk with an app open beside the page. They were writing on a phone, in a notes app, between other things. So the 2026 rebuild is mobile-first and lives in a browser, a click from the document, with a word of the day, search in English or Chinese, and a shuffle die for when you do not yet know what you are looking for.
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2018 · desktop
The desktop original was dark and dense. I built it from my own class materials, and even then the words were grouped by function, so a student could find a phrase by the job it did in a sentence.
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2019 · the redesign
The redesign, lighter and roughly three times the size. I split the connectors into finer functional groups but kept the same way of organizing them.
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2026 · mobile, under Human
On a phone at last, one tap from the draft. Same structure as 2018, but for the first time it lived where the writing actually happened.
A bilingual tool has to read correctly in both languages, including out loud.
Every Chinese gloss is tagged so a screen reader switches voices instead of reading it as broken English.
The students here are already working in a second language, and some of them around dyslexia or attention differences, so a build that only works for confident readers would leave out the people who need it. The bilingual text was the hardest part to get right. A screen reader meeting Chinese inside an English page tries to voice it as English and turns it to noise, so every Chinese gloss is tagged as Traditional Chinese and the reader switches voices instead of stumbling.
- Reachable by keyboard. Skip links open the tab order and focus moves through the page in a logical path with a visible ring, so nothing needs a mouse.
- Results that speak. Run a search and a live region announces the result, so a screen-reader user hears that matches came back rather than guessing.
- Calm by default. It respects the system settings for reduced motion and for dark mode, which matters for learners who find motion or glare costly.
- Built on real structure. One main region, a clean heading outline, and labelled controls, so a screen reader can jump straight to a section instead of hunting for it by eye.
It clears an automated WCAG 2.1 AA audit with no violations, contrast included. The audit was only the baseline. What I was after was a student on a screen reader or a keyboard finding the next word as fast as anyone else.
Students use it to write. Then they find a use I had not planned.
The app-switching mostly stopped, and the shuffle die became a live speaking game I now use in class.
They reach for it mid-draft, which was the whole point. The app-switching that started this, the leaving and the lost thread, mostly stopped.
The better outcome was one I did not design. In class, the shuffle die turned into a speaking exercise. A student taps it, gets a word, and has to use it out loud, on the spot, in front of everyone. What I had built as a quiet writing reference became a game for talking, and that is now part of how I run a room. The tool is live and bilingual, and I use it in my own teaching every week.
It is not only mine now. The other teachers at Human use it with their own classes, and their feedback is what decides the next thing I add.
What I would do differently: I built a desktop app for a problem that lived on a phone.
I built for the platform I knew. The problem lived on a phone, and it took years to follow it there.
In 2018 I shipped a desktop application. It was the kind of thing I knew how to make, and it worked. But the moment I was designing for, a learner stuck in the middle of a sentence, was already happening on a phone, and before long it was happening nowhere else. It took me until 2026 to put the tool where the writing was. The container was never the value. I know I can still get closer to the work, because my students found the best use of the tool, the speaking game, before I did.