Learn vocabulary in context, not in isolation

Drilling a word against a single definition teaches you that one pairing — not the word. In real reading the same word arrives in a different sentence, a different register, sometimes a different sense entirely, and the rote version doesn't follow it there. You recognize the flashcard and blank on the page, which feels like a memory failure but is really a context failure.

Learning vocabulary in context builds the flexible understanding that does transfer. When you meet a word inside a real sentence, you absorb not just a meaning but a usage — how it behaves, what it sits next to, what kind of writing it belongs to — and that is the version your brain can apply the next time the word shows up somewhere new.

Context is more than the sentence as a string of words. It is the topic of the passage, the tone of the writer, the grammatical role the word is playing, and your own memory of where you were and what you were reading when you met it. Each of those is a retrieval cue — a separate thread your memory can pull on later to bring the word back.

A bare word-and-definition pair has none of those threads, which is why it slips away so easily. Context vocabulary learning works because it gives a single word several different ways to be remembered instead of just one.

You don't need someone else's word list. The words worth learning are the ones already in front of you — in the articles, books, documentation, and subtitles you read because you wanted to, not because a course assigned them. Those words are pre-filtered by relevance: you met them, so they matter to your actual life and reading level.

Capecho is built around that idea. Rest your cursor near an unfamiliar word on your Mac and press the shortcut; macOS's on-device text recognition reads the word and the sentence around it, even in text you can't select, and you curate your vocabulary simply by reading. If a capture grabs the wrong token, you correct it in the preview before saving — the sentence comes along as context, and you keep only what you approve.

Good readers guess word meanings from context all the time, and that guessing is valuable — it is how you learn words you were never formally taught. But an inference is fragile until something confirms it, and a wrong guess that goes unchecked can quietly stick.

Capecho lets you keep the sentence you inferred from and confirm the meaning without leaving your reading. The free word explanation gives you core meaning, part of speech, distinct senses, and pronunciation; when the specific usage is what you're unsure about, the optional in-context explanation reads the word as it appears in your sentence — metered, free up to ten a day (unlimited on Pro), and never a wall on the rest of the loop.

Context makes a word understandable; spaced repetition makes it durable. On its own, even a word you grasped perfectly in context fades if you never meet it again — the forgetting curve is patient but relentless. Review is what interrupts it at the right moment.

Capecho keeps the context that made the word make sense and schedules the spaced reviews that keep it. Saved words return as FSRS cards fronted by your own sentence with the word highlighted, and you rate each one Forget, Hard, Good, or Easy so the schedule adapts to how well you actually know it. No manual card-building stands between reading the word and remembering it.

Today the whole loop lives on your Mac: you capture while you read and you review there too. A phone review companion is coming, so the words you gathered at your desk will resurface in the in-between moments of your day. And because the system is built first for English but never English-only, words in other languages can already be captured, saved, and reviewed while generated explanations expand after quality validation.

Capecho is a complement to the dictionaries and review tools you already use, not a replacement — you can export your context-rich words to Anki or CSV at any time. The point is simply this: learn words in context from the reading you were already doing, and let review turn that contextual understanding into vocabulary you keep.