blog
Building Sisu: a Finnish vocabulary trainer
Finnish has fifteen grammatical cases and I have a vocabulary quiz every Tuesday. So I’m building Sisu — a small spaced-repetition app for Finnish vocabulary, in public, and writing up the process as I go.
The plan
- A deck format that understands word families (talo, talossa, talosta…), not just flat card pairs.
- SM-2 scheduling to start, tweaked once I have my own review data.
- Boring tech on purpose: Astro for the shell, SQLite for storage, no framework.
Why “sisu”?
It’s the Finnish word for stubborn, gritty determination — which is also the only realistic strategy for the partitive case.
Follow along here; every devlog entry gets the sisu tag.