Past the beginner apps? Build the vocabulary you actually read.

Once you're past the intermediate stage, most vocabulary apps quietly stop being useful. They're built on frequency lists and beginner curricula — the common few thousand words you already know. The words you still don't know aren't on those lists; they're rarer, more specific, and they show up once, in something particular you happened to read. A generic app can't teach you those, because it has no idea what you read.

The bottleneck has also moved. At this level your grammar is mostly settled and your problem is sheer breadth — not knowing enough words. That isn't a course you can buy your way through; it's a coverage gap that only the reading you actually do can close, one real encounter at a time.

The pool of words above your level is enormous, and most of them surface rarely. Drilling a generic "advanced words" list is mostly wasted effort: you grind terms you might use once a year, if ever, and they fade before they're ever useful. The words worth keeping are the ones you actually hit in real reading — pre-filtered by relevance, because you met them in something you cared enough to read.

Isolation also stops working at this level. A rare word memorized as a bare gloss doesn't transfer to the page, because advanced vocabulary lives in its context — the sentence, the register, the field it belongs to. Learned in context, a word arrives with the cues that let you recognize it next time; learned in a silo, it stays a flashcard you ace and then blank on while reading.

Capecho doesn't hand you someone else's list. You build your advanced vocabulary from what you already read — articles, papers, documentation, books, subtitles — by capturing the words that actually stop you. One shortcut on your Mac grabs the word and the exact sentence around it, in any app, even text you can't select, and you keep reading.

There's no word-picker and no daily list, because your reading already picks the words. What accumulates is a vocabulary that's relevant by construction: precisely the words at the edge of your level, in the contexts where they matter to you.

At an advanced level you rarely need a word translated — you need to know which of its senses is live in your sentence and what nuance it carries here. Capecho's explanation gives you the core meaning, part of speech, and distinct senses, and when the specific usage is the hard part, an opt-in in-context explanation resolves the exact sense the word takes in your line. A handoff to the macOS system dictionary is there when you want the exhaustive entry.

Translation stays available when you want it; it just isn't the ceiling. The point is to leave understanding the word well enough to use it, not to swap it for one token in your own language and move on.

The hard part of advanced vocabulary is exactly that the words are rare: you might not meet one again for months — long after you've forgotten it. Capecho closes that gap by bringing each saved word back as spaced-repetition review, surfaced just before you'd lose it, each card fronted by your own sentence so you rehearse the word the way you actually met it.

Because capturing already built the card, there's nothing to assemble by hand — the single biggest reason advanced learners abandon flashcards. Words you find hard come back sooner; words that settle drift out of the way, so your minutes land on the vocabulary that still needs them.

Capecho is built first for English — its first quality-validated target — but it was never English-only: words in other languages can be captured, saved, and reviewed today, and generated explanations expand as each language passes its quality check. The whole loop — capture, understand, review — is free, with no subscription on what you do every day, and your context-rich words export to Anki or CSV anytime.

It's a complement to the reading you already do and the tools you already trust, not a course that replaces them. The promise is narrow and honest: turn the rare, scattered words you meet at an advanced level into vocabulary you keep.