The worst thing about most language apps isn't the difficulty. It's the amnesia.
You spend a week telling an app about your job, your sister in Lisbon, the trip you're nervous about — and none of it lands anywhere. Every session opens the same way the last one did, from nothing. You're not talking to a tutor. You're feeding a machine that resets between coins.
A real tutor doesn't do that. A real tutor says "how did the interview go?" — and that one question does more for your language than a week of flashcards, because now you have something you actually want to say and no way to say it yet. That's the moment learning happens. It only exists if somebody remembered.
Three things a session, and nothing more
When a conversation ends, Wading reads back over the last stretch of it and notes up to three durable facts about you. Things you volunteered: has a sister in Lisbon. Interviewing for a nursing job next month. Cooks most nights.
Three, and only from what you actually said. Not inferred, not scraped, not bought. At most 120 of them are kept in total, which sounds like a limit until you realize it's roughly what a friend of several years holds about you.
At the start of your next conversation, Wade reads that list. That's the whole mechanism. It's why he opens with the interview instead of the weather, and why the vocabulary he reaches for tends to be vocabulary you have a reason to want.
Why this is a learning feature, not a retention trick
There's a version of "personalization" that exists to make an app harder to leave. This isn't that, and the difference is worth being precise about.
Memory earns its place here because language is about something. Vocabulary that arrives attached to your actual life — your job, your kitchen, the trip in April — sticks in a way that vocabulary from a themed unit never does. The word for "nervous" learned while describing a real interview is a different word, cognitively, than the same word learned from a list.
So Wade remembers in order to give you something worth saying. That's it. He isn't keeping score, and there's no streak riding on any of it.
The line
Some of what people mention in a language lesson is genuinely private. Health. Faith. Money. Grief. Politics. A hard thing about someone else. People say these things to a patient listener — that's what patient listeners are for — and a tutor who flinched away from them would be useless.
So Wade does keep those, and he uses them the way a friend would: gently, and only in conversation with you.
But every fact is flagged for sensitivity the moment it's recorded, and anything flagged is structurally excluded from choosing which sponsor you see. Not as a policy someone has to remember to follow — the ad-matching code reads from a query that cannot return those rows. Something you said about your health or your grief can never be the reason a sponsor appears in front of you. We wrote that down in the advertising policy and then built the code so it couldn't be quietly untrue later.
Nothing Wade remembers is ever sent to an advertiser. Nothing is sold. There's a switch in Account that stops your conversations influencing sponsors at all.
Being forgotten on purpose
One more thing, because it matters and most apps skip it: you can ask Wade to forget.
Not everything you mention in passing deserves to become a durable fact about you, and you're the judge of that, not us. Email privacy@lc.wading.ai and we'll tell you exactly what's on your list, or take anything off it you'd rather wasn't there. Deleting your account clears the whole thing permanently — ours included, no archive, no restore, nobody can undo it.
We'll be honest that this isn't self-serve yet: today it's an email to a human, not a button in the app. A screen where you can read your own list and cross things off is the version this should be, and it's on the way. Until it lands, ask and it's done.
A good tutor remembers your life. A good tutor also knows when to let something go. We're trying to build both.
Come wade in — he'll remember you were here.