iPhone Not Storing Custom Words

Here’s the thing: I’ve been enjoying iPhone keyboard’s ability to store custom keywords on its own and use them when sliding on the keyboard on iPhone 13 Pro. When I switched to iPhone 16 Pro Max, however, this ability has gone. I can’t even slide/swipe my own name as it doesn’t recognise it anymore.

Here’s how it used to work:

• when I wanted to store a new word, I’d type it in the whole word, say I’d type: “Kitnay” (کتنے means how many in Urdu)
• In the predictive suggestions, it would present me only “Kitnay” with quotes
• I tap on “Kitnay” and the next time I don’t have to type it in. It would be available when I slide. Or it would suggest the word if I had typed it in half way through.

Over time I had so many words saved that I’d easily type/slide whole sentences in Urdu in Roman letters, as it’s very common for us to do that as writing on Qwerty is easy for us, rather than Arabic/Urdu letters.

I’ve lost the ability to do that somehow and not able to achieve this after changing different settings. Please help me out here. Otherwise I’ll have to start using Google keyboard. That I don’t use because I like being able to scroll the cursor up/down through a paragraph by tap holding the space bar. Google keyboard only allows you to scroll sideways and not up.

This is how my settings look like: