Building a thing for people who read in a foreign language and keep forgetting the words. Tell me if it's a bad idea.

I've been learning English for years and I read a lot in it. Novels, articles, whatever. At this point I'm comfortable enough that I don't need lessons, but I still run into words I don't know constantly, and that's where it falls apart for me.

The pattern is always the same. I hit a word I don't know, look it up, understand the sentence, keep reading. Two weeks later I hit the same word again and have no memory of ever having seen it. I've looked up some words four or five times.

So I'm building the thing I actually wanted.

You point your phone at whatever you're reading. A page of a book, a menu, a street sign, a screenshot of subtitles. It reads the text and every word becomes tappable. You tap the ones you don't know and carry on reading. That's the whole interaction, maybe three seconds.

What gets saved isn't just the word. It keeps the sentence you found it in, plus a crop of the photo showing where it was. So when it quizzes you later it uses your sentence with the word blanked out, not some generic textbook example. And there's a picture of the actual page you were looking at.

The part I'm most attached to: the photo on each card starts out blurry and gets sharper as you actually learn the word. Not one step per correct answer. It only sharpens when the scheduling algorithm reckons the memory has genuinely become more durable, and if you neglect a word it goes slightly blurry again. Your collection ends up being a visual map of what you really know versus what you're kidding yourself about.

It also tracks coverage per source, so if you keep scanning the same book it can tell you roughly what share of its vocabulary you've got. (I hope so!)

What it isn't: a course. No curriculum, no lessons, no grammar teaching. It's useless on day one of a new language. It only does anything if you're already reading or living in the language and bumping into words you don't know, which is exactly the situation I'm in and where I've never found anything that fits.

Things I'm genuinely unsure about:

• Whether anyone else cares about the photo, or whether that's just my own weirdness
• Whether "scan the book you're reading" is a real habit or something only I would do
• Languages with heavy inflection or non-Latin scripts. Matching a word form back to its dictionary form is where I expect this to fall apart first.

No link, it's not in the stores yet, I'm still building it. When it is, I'd like people to properly break it, especially anyone learning something with cases, agglutination or a script that isn't Latin.

Happy to answer anything. And if you think the whole premise is wrong, I'd much rather hear that now than after launch.

(TL)

submitted by /u/Lockdog88
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