English Vocabulary Practice Online, Level by Level
Most vocabulary apps are a deck. You see a word, you flip a card, you see it again tomorrow. That is a legitimate method for remembering labels. It is a poor method for knowing whether you have the vocabulary of a CEFR band, in the same sitting machinery you use for grammar and reading, with a mastery bar that is attached to a topic rather than to a streak of green ticks on a phone.
This article is about vocabulary as a skill on My Path’s General English bank: about 577 items across four skills and six CEFR levels, sat on Education, one Level at a time. It is not a flashcard product with a CEFR sticker. It is not Cambridge. It is not IELTS or TOEFL — those are Off. There is no listening vocab dictation and no speaking prompt. We are not affiliated with any awarding body.
If you want the whole English card rather than this skill, read the General English practice test overview first.
What “CEFR-shaped” vocabulary practice means
CEFR bands are not word-count badges, but they are not mysticism either. A1 vocabulary is the closed, high-frequency set you need to get through a simple interaction: people, places, time, food, very common verbs, the adjectives that actually appear in beginner texts. C1 vocabulary is not “harder flashcards of the same list.” It is a different inventory: stance, abstraction, collocation, words that are common in argument and rare in a tourist phrasebook.
A generic deck usually cannot tell those inventories apart except by tagging. You can put a C1 word in an A2 deck by accident. You can grind 400 words that do not belong to the band you are trying to sit. You can also “know” a word as a translation and still fail it in a sentence at that band.
On this card, vocabulary items live inside a CEFR Level. You pick A2 and vocabulary, and you are practising A2 vocabulary items, not a random sample of English. That is the whole contrast. The item is still an item — choose, complete, match in context — not a teacher asking you to teach the word back. The gain is that the pool has a band, the sitting has a band, and the score is about that band.
If you need spaced repetition of a private word list from your course, keep the flashcard app. Use this bank to test whether the band’s vocabulary items still beat you when they are not on your list.
Why a sitting is not a deck
Flashcards isolate the lemma. Sittings do not. A vocabulary item at B1 might need the word in a collocation, a slight change of form, or a choice among near-synonyms that are all “known” as translations. That is closer to how the word fails you in a reading passage than a card that shows the L1 on the back.
The sitting also shares machinery with the rest of Education:
- Size 10 / 20 / 60, default 20.
- Timer off / relaxed / exam mode.
- Immediate feedback or review at end.
- Free or forward-only navigation.
- Skip and flag.
You cannot do most of that in a deck without turning the deck into a worse quiz app. You also cannot, in a typical deck, retry only the flagged items from this afternoon’s twenty, then sit a mixed English paper at the same Level to see whether the words transfer into reading.
That transfer is the point of putting vocabulary inside the hub. A word you can flip on a card and still miss in a B1 reading item was never available in the way you thought. Sit vocabulary, then sit reading at the same Level. If the reading misses are still those words, the card was recognition. The sitting was closer to use.
Grammar sits next to this for the same reason. Some “vocab misses” are form misses: you knew the noun and chose the wrong morphology. That is a grammar sitting, not another deck of the same lemma.
One Level per sitting, labelled Level
The picker says Level, not Grade. Values are A1–C2. One band per sitting. Selecting several still rolls one. Mixed-level vocabulary pools are refused.
This matters more for vocabulary than people expect. High-frequency A1 words mixed with C1 academic items produce a cheerful score for anyone who knows the easy half and guesses the rest. It also produces an error list that is unusable: you cannot tell whether to study survival English or hedging verbs.
The design is the language version of why grade bands matter in practice. Keep the inventory coherent. Move band when A2 vocabulary items are no longer teaching you anything you can name, not when you are bored of being A2 as an identity.
If you do not know your band, start lower. Vocabulary is the skill where ego is loudest. Sitting C1 because your job is in English, then scoring noise, teaches you nothing about the C1 inventory. Sit B1 or B2 until the misses are specific.
How demand changes A1 to C2 (practical, not a frequency list)
A1. Closed set, concrete, repetitive on purpose. Numbers, family, daily verbs, classroom and shop language. Misses are usually “I do not have this word yet,” not “I confused two academic near-synonyms.” Drill A1. Do not skip it.
A2. Everyday range expands: travel, work at a basic level, feelings, simple narrative. Phrasal verbs start to appear as items, not as decoration. A2 vocabulary fails in sentences more than on lists.
B1. Enough range to tell a story and handle familiar work or study topics, plus the first wave of words that are easy to recognise and hard to choose among. Collocation starts to matter. Translation-only knowledge starts to fail.
B2. Precision. You are expected to know not just a word but a better word for a constraint: formal versus neutral, strong versus hedged, the collocate that native materials actually use. B2 vocab misses often look like “I knew a word that would work in conversation and not in this sentence.”
C1. Abstract and evaluative vocabulary, plus the last common academic and professional inventory. Items will punish approximate synonyms. If you only ever learn words from headlines, C1 sittings will feel unfair. They are not unfair. They are a different inventory.
C2. Residual, low-frequency, fine register. Sit C2 vocabulary when C1 is actually stable, not as a dare.
None of this is a promise that every item at a band maps to a published wordlist. It is a description of what the skill is for at that rung so you stop using one mixed deck for every ambition.
Recognition is not availability
Flashcard streaks train a specific behaviour: seeing a prompt and producing a pair. That pair can be L1–L2, or word–definition, or word–example. All of those are recognition or cued recall. They are not the same as having the word available when a sentence at that CEFR band requires a choice among three plausible options.
Availability fails in boring ways. You “know” make and do and still pick the wrong one. You “know” a formal verb and still reach for a chatty one. You recognise a word in a reading passage and cannot choose it in a vocabulary item that uses a different collocate. A deck will often mark all three of those as known because the lemma was seen. A sitting will mark two of them wrong. Believe the sitting.
This is why the drill lives in the Education hub. Mastery is per-topic, not per-lemma: the bar moves when you can do the items, not when you have flipped a card. Complexity 1–5 sits behind that bar so a topic is not binary. You can be fine at easy items in a topic and still leak on denser ones at the same CEFR Level. A streak of green ticks will not tell you that.
Use a deck for the five words from today’s retry list if you like. Do not use it as the test of whether you have B2 vocabulary. The test, on this product, is a B2 vocabulary sitting, then a B2 reading sitting to see whether those words survive a passage.
If months of flashcards meet a poor score at your supposed band, the usual explanation is not that the bank is “too exam-like.” It is that the inventory you drilled was not the inventory the band uses in sentences. Drop a Level until misses are specific, then work back up. Do not add another thousand cards first.
Topic filter, then transfer
The topic filter on the General English card is a closed vocabulary. It will not invent a category because you typed “business phrasal verbs.” Pick a topic the card actually offers, combine it with one Level, and sit vocabulary. That is how you isolate a leak that keeps showing up in mixed sittings.
Do not live in one topic forever. Alternate: filtered sitting, mixed-skill sitting at the same Level, reading at the same Level. The filter finds the leak; mixed checks the rest of the band; reading checks whether the word exists outside the vocab item.
Skip is more useful in vocabulary than people think. Ticking an option because it looks vaguely Latin is how you poison the error list. Skip, submit, then you have an honest unknown. Flag when you narrowed it to two and guessed. Retry flagged is how you catch the lookalike problem without pretending you knew the word.
Size 20 is enough to see a pattern. Size 60 is for a band you already sit well, when you want volume, not when you are still discovering whether B1 is the right Level. Size 10 is a probe: new band, or a topic you have not touched. Do not probe C2 for fun. Probe one band below the one your ego wanted.
Immediate feedback, exam mode, mastery
Immediate feedback is the default while you are still acquiring the band. You want to see the miss while the sentence is warm. Review-at-end is the check: can you still choose the word without a nudge after every item. Timer off until the inventory is familiar. A clock on vocabulary turns the sitting into a panic about speed, which is a different skill.
Retry wrong the same day. Mastery is per-topic, complexity 1–5, topic master badge at 80% — the other contrast with a generic app. The bar sits on the same topics you can filter, next to grammar and reading. Streaks and badges exist (including polyglot if you sit other languages). Do not centre the week on them. Centre it on finishing sittings at one Level and clearing the retry list.
AI gap analysis, if you have Student or Monthly tokens, can cluster misses. Use it after you have looked at them. A list of unknown words is already information. The useful extra is whether they are one topic or noise.
A week of vocabulary that stays inside the hub
- Two vocabulary sittings, size 20, one Level, immediate feedback.
- Same-day retry wrong.
- One reading sitting at the same Level, to catch words that only fail in a passage.
- One mixed sitting at the same Level.
- Once a week, vocabulary in exam mode, same Level.
Keep a tiny personal list if you want — five misses, not fifty — and make the next vocabulary sitting the test of whether those five moved. Do not rebuild Anki as a second career. The bank is already a test. The flashcard app is optional homework.
Writing items will also expose vocabulary, especially register. If writing practice misses are “this word is too informal” or “this is the wrong collocate,” come back here at the same band. If they are cohesion and clause combining, stay on writing.
What this will not do
It will not teach pronunciation. There is no audio.
It will not mark whether you can use the word in a conversation.
It will not replace extensive reading, which is still how most vocabulary actually arrives.
It will not give you an official wordlist certificate.
It will not open as a free deck. Education is Student or Monthly. For Me (€4.99) and Around Me (€9.99) include zero Education. Student is €9.99/month, unlimited Education, no trial — “Get Student — €9.99/month.” Monthly is €19.99/month. GBP mirrors EUR; PLN is on plans. Signup grace does not open the hub. You do not buy vocabulary per sitting.
Same grid, other languages: German, Spanish, French. Hub: Education on My Path. Plan: Student plan.
Sit the band, not a random deck
Open General English, set one Level, set vocabulary, sit twenty, retry the misses, then sit reading at the same band. That is online vocabulary practice with a level, inside the same product as the rest of your Education week. A flashcard app can still exist next to it. It should not replace it if what you needed was a CEFR-shaped sitting.