This is a vocabulary system for the TOEFL iBT. It teaches academic words and how to use them at speed; it is not a four-skills course.

On the TOEFL, you don’t lose points because your English is broken. You lose them because a passage uses a word you half-know, and the clock doesn’t wait.

TOEFL passages and lectures are written in one register: general academic English. The same few thousand words carry the meaning whether the topic is plate tectonics, human memory, or the wool trade. Know them cold and the content is all you have to think about. Half-know them and every paragraph costs you seconds you needed for the questions.

Turning a half-known word into an instantly-known one takes two things a single product can’t give you on its own: repetition with feedback (that’s the flashcard deck) and the word doing its job in a real sentence, then tested the way the TOEFL tests it (that’s the reader). This is both, built to the same 2,000-word list, at a price below buying them apart.

TOEFL Vocabulary Flashcards — the app

An offline flashcard app you open in any browser. Tap a card to flip it; swipe right for words you know and they drop out of rotation, swipe left and they come back. Every card carries the word, its part of speech, the American IPA, a one-line definition, an example sentence in real academic register, two or three synonyms, a collocations line, and spoken audio on both the word and the example — a natural American voice, the accent you’ll meet in the Listening section. A “Studying” menu narrows the whole deck to the Core 500, or one of 12 academic subjects, or the Precision words, in a tap. Delivered as an instant link that opens straight in your browser (add it to your home screen for an app icon), plus a ZIP to keep working with zero signal, forever.

The Scholar’s Mind — the reader

A 491-page book, 146 chapters, that teaches the same 2,000 words by putting each one in an original academic passage and then making you use it. Every chapter: The Frame (the thinking this cluster gives you), the Passage (300–400 words at the TOEFL’s exact register, target words in bold), Recall (rebuild an 80–120-word summary of it from memory — the TOEFL prose-summary task), Infer (3–4 “the word X is closest in meaning to…” questions, no word bank — the real vocabulary-in-context format), The Shift (what you can now do), and Say It, Own It (one spoken sentence of your own). A consolidated answer key covers all 146 chapters. PDF and reflowable EPUB, both included.

How they work together

Read a cluster in the book. The next day, the chapter-end link opens the deck already filtered to those exact words, and you drill them with audio. A few days later, the deck’s spaced rotation brings them back. That read → recall → drill → review loop is the spacing memory research calls for, and it’s why these two are sold as a system rather than two separate things you’d have to line up yourself.

How the words were chosen

The list was built by working down the merged academic-frequency ranking — Coxhead’s Academic Word List, the Academic Vocabulary List from the 120-million-word academic corpus of COCA, and the New Academic Word List — then filtered against a general-English frequency list so nothing everyday takes a slot. It is the recurring academic vocabulary of the register the TOEFL is written in.

Who it’s for

Anyone preparing for the TOEFL iBT whose grammar is solid but who slows down on academic vocabulary — which costs most in Reading and Listening. The Core and subject tiers are useful from the first week; the Precision tier is for test-takers pushing an already-good score higher.

Who’s behind it

Made by Dr. Henry English, founder of Concord Black — a school director with a BA in English Language and Literature, a BA in English Language Teaching, a master’s degree in English Language Teaching, and a PhD in English Language and Philosophy, who has spent years watching capable students read every word of a passage and still run out of time.

Get the app and the book — the same 2,000 recurring TOEFL words, drilled with audio and taught in 146 passages — for $11.

—