A micro-learning vocabulary app

A few cards while the kettle boils. A minute before a meeting starts. Micro-learning works because it lowers the cost of starting to almost nothing — and a review you'll actually begin beats a thorough study block you keep postponing. The hard part of remembering vocabulary was never the effort of any single review; it was the consistency, and short sessions are what make consistency survivable.

Spaced repetition is a natural fit for this rhythm. It doesn't need long, heavy sittings — it needs short, regular contact at the right moments, exactly the kind of contact that fits between the other things in your day.

Memory fades on a curve, and the way to interrupt that curve is to meet a word again just before it slips — not to grind it twenty times in one sitting. Cramming feels productive and decays fast; brief reviews spread across days are what move a word into long-term memory. The spacing is doing the work, not the duration.

That is why a daily vocabulary review measured in minutes can outperform an occasional marathon. You're not trying to overpower forgetting in one go; you're showing up often enough that each word gets caught at the moment review helps most.

Micro-learning only works if there's zero setup — the instant a review turns into a chore, the small gap closes and you reach for your phone instead. The friction can't live at the start of the session.

In Capecho there is no setup, because every card was already built when you captured the word. Each one carries the exact sentence you met it in, with the word highlighted, plus its free explanation — core meaning, part of speech, distinct senses, and pronunciation. Nothing to format, no deck to assemble; you open it and the words that are due are simply there, fronted by the context that makes them recallable.

Here's the whole loop of one review: a card shows your sentence with the new word highlighted, you try to recall what it means, then you rate how it went — Forget, Hard, Good, or Easy. That's it. The whole thing takes seconds, and because the card starts from real context, you're practicing recognition the way you'll actually meet the word again.

Your rating feeds the schedule. Words you find shaky come back soon; words you know well drift further out and stop taking your time. The system spends your minutes on the words that need them, which is what keeps a short vocabulary review genuinely short.

You don't need to carve out study time for this — the time already exists, scattered through the day in the gaps you'd otherwise spend scrolling. The point of a micro-learning vocabulary app is to turn those gaps into the regular contact spaced repetition wants, without it ever feeling like homework.

Today you review on your Mac, alongside where you capture while reading. A phone review companion is coming, and that's where micro-learning on the go comes into its own — your captured words will sync to it so the commute, the queue, and the minute before bed become review minutes. The promise is the small-moments habit; today it lives on the Mac, with the pocket version on the way.

The core loop is free and unmetered: capture, the full word explanation, your Word Book, and FSRS review all cost nothing, with no subscription on the core loop — Pro is the optional upgrade for unlimited saved words and unlimited in-context. The one metered piece on Free is the optional in-context explanation — the word as used in your sentence — free up to ten a day, and reaching that limit never blocks a single review.

And none of it locks you in. Capecho is a complement to the spaced-repetition tools you may already love, not a wall around your words; export to Anki or CSV anytime. Built first for English and never English-only, it exists to make the remembering as light as the reading — a few words, in a few minutes, whenever you have them.