Zeka — Help & FAQ

What is Zeka?

A free, ad-free app for learning Serbian (and Italian) from A1 to C1. It combines short topical lessons, spaced-repetition flashcards, and drills for the parts of Serbian that trip most learners up: noun cases, verb conjugation and aspect, and real sentences.

Guest vs. account

Try without an account puts you straight into the app. Your progress is saved in this browser on this device — close the tab and come back, and it's still there. It won't follow you to another device, and clearing site data removes it.

Signing in (Google or email) keeps the same learning, and adds cloud sync across devices, a username and friend code, and a friends list. Signing in later from a guest session starts from your account's progress, not the guest's.

How learning works

• Lessons start with the Conversation Path: steps built around real situations (greeting people, ordering a coffee, asking the way). Each step opens with a short dialogue and a grammar note, then practises the words and phrases. Steps open in order; a step also opens once you already know most of its words, and you can test out of a locked step by scoring 80% or more. Below the path, Topic packs hold vocabulary by subject (food, animals, work…) and are always open.
• Some Serbian words change with who is speaking (umoran / umorna sam). Zeka asks once which forms to use for you; change it any time in Profile.
• Flashcards use spaced repetition: after you grade a card (Again / Hard / Good / Easy) it comes back in minutes, then a day, then longer, as your memory strengthens. Every card shows the word in a real sentence. Forgetting a word you knew doesn't send it back to the start: after one quick retry it returns at about half its old gap, and remembering a word after a long break counts in your favour. If you got a word with effort, press Hard rather than Again.
• Due cards are scheduled for review now. New cards are words you haven't met yet, introduced most useful first: the words people say every day (I, you, to be, to want, where, today) come before specialist vocabulary like classroom objects or grammar terms. The daily limit caps new words per day so tomorrow's reviews stay manageable. You can change it or pause new words on the flashcard screen, and "Keep going" lets you push past it. When more than 60 reviews are due, catch-up mode holds new words back until you're caught up.
• Match, Verbs, Cases and Sentences are extra practice: cross-topic matching, present-tense conjugation, all seven cases, and a daily sentence with blanks.
• Streak counts consecutive days with any completed session. ELO rises and falls with lesson accuracy.

Typing Serbian

Answers are checked without regard to case or diacritics, so obecavati is accepted for obećavati. A row of š ž č ć đ keys appears under text fields if you want to type them properly.

Serbian only

Zeka teaches Serbian in Latin script (ekavian): 90+ units, 118 verbs in present, past and future, case drills, cloze, reading texts and a sentence bank. The Italian course was retired in October 2026. If you studied Italian here, your progress is still saved; it just isn't shown in the app anymore.

Listening

Words and sentences come with audio as it is recorded and checked: a speaker button plays a clip, 🐢 plays a sentence slowly, and the Listening drill (under ⋯) asks you to pick the meaning of what you hear or type it out. Every clip is listened to before it goes in, so only some items have audio at first. You can stop clips playing automatically from the Flashcards screen.

Privacy

Zeka counts visits with Umami, which uses no cookies and doesn't identify you. Once a day the app also sends how many days it has been since this device first opened Zeka, so we can tell whether people come back. Nothing you type or learn is included. You can switch this off in Profile. Guest progress stays on your device; account progress is stored in Firebase.

Credits

Most example sentences and their English translations come from Tatoeba, a collaborative collection of sentences, and are used under the CC BY 2.0 FR licence. Wherever one appears in the app, a small "Tatoeba #…" link opens the original sentence and its contributor. Grammar exercises, reading texts and lesson content are written for Zeka. The order in which flashcards introduce new words draws on the Serbian word-frequency list from FrequencyWords (built from OpenSubtitles, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Questions or bugs

Zeka is a small independent project, free and without ads.