Why I built Capecho
I kept looking up the same English words and forgetting them by the next page. Dictionaries, Anki, and Kindle each missed by a little — so I built the capture-to-review loop I actually wanted.
I read in English every day — documentation, articles, the occasional book. I'm a native Chinese speaker, comfortable enough that I don't think about the language most of the time. And then, every few paragraphs, a word I only half-know.
For years my routine was the same: look it up, nod at the definition, keep reading. It felt like progress. It wasn't. A week later I'd meet the same word and draw the same blank — because looking a word up and remembering it are two completely different things, and I was only ever doing the first one.
The same word, a week later
The frustrating part is that I already knew what fixed this — spaced repetition. The problem was everything that happened before the review.
I tried the obvious tools, and each one missed by a little:
- Dictionaries answer the question once and then forget it for you. The word goes into a list I never opened again — a graveyard, not a memory.
- Anki has the right engine, but building the cards by hand was more work than the reading itself. Copy the word, copy the sentence, open the app, paste, format, schedule — do that eight times in a session and you've stopped reading. So I told myself I'd make the cards later, and later never came.
- Kindle captures words in their sentence, beautifully — and then keeps them inside Kindle. It doesn't help with the article, the PDF, the documentation, or anything else I actually read.
- A dedicated ChatGPT "project" — at one point I set one up just to study words. The explanations were genuinely good. But there was no spaced repetition, so every word I "learned" there sank without a trace, and a week later it was gone just the same.
None of these was bad. They each solved one slice of the loop and left the rest to me — and the part they left to me was exactly the part with all the friction.
It turned out I wasn't the only one
Before I wrote a line of code, I went looking to see whether other people felt this too, or whether I was just being lazy. I read through dozens of threads from people learning languages and wrestling with vocabulary.
The most-upvoted thing I found was a post whose title was almost word-for-word my own complaint: "I got tired of Googling words I don't know." Underneath it, hundreds of people describing the identical loop — look it up, forget it, look it up again. The same story, over and over: saving a word is easy; keeping it is the part nobody had made painless.
That settled it. This wasn't my private quirk. It was a small, daily, almost universal annoyance that no one had closed the loop on.
So I built the loop I wanted
Capecho is the tool I wished existed while I was reading:
- Capture the word — and the sentence it lived in — with a single keystroke, straight off whatever I'm reading. No copy-pasting, no card-building.
- Understand it with a clear in-context explanation: a plain core meaning, and when I want it, what the word means in my exact sentence.
- Review it before it fades, with spaced repetition, fronted by my own sentence — so I'm remembering the word the way I actually met it.
Capture, then echo. That's the name: Capture + echo.
A few principles fell out of building it for myself instead of for a pitch deck. The core loop is free — I wouldn't pay a subscription to remember my own reading, and I don't expect you to. It's private by default: text recognition runs only when you press the shortcut, the screen image never leaves your Mac, and you confirm every word before it's saved. And it's a complement to Anki, not a replacement — you can export everything to Anki or CSV whenever you like. Your words are yours.
Where it is now
Capecho is early. The Mac app — the capture half — is in beta, and the phone review companion, where idle minutes on the go become review minutes, is coming next. I'm building it in the open, as one person, and I'd rather be honest about what isn't ready than oversell it.
If you read in a second language and keep losing the words, I think you'll feel right at home. See how it works, or join the Mac beta — and tell me what's missing.
— Shawn (Xichuan Liu) · LinkedIn