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Lexicamp

Guide

How to save words while reading (and actually remember them)

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You’re reading in your second language, you hit a word you don’t know, you look it up, you read on. Two weeks later you meet the same word and look it up again. That second lookup is the whole problem, and it’s not a memory failure but a system failure. The word was never saved anywhere, and the ten seconds you spent bought you nothing beyond that one sentence.

Reading is the best vocabulary source you have — with a catch

Words met while reading arrive with what no word list can give them: a context you were already invested in. That’s retrieval scaffolding, not sentiment. And reading selects for you: the vocabulary in what you actually read is, by definition, the vocabulary your life in that language requires.

The catch is that reading alone doesn’t keep what it hands you, and the research is blunt on both ends. On comprehension: Hu and Nation found learners need to know about 98% of the running words on a page to read unassisted with good comprehension. At 95% coverage, which sounds nearly fluent and means an unknown word every couple of lines, only 6 of their 17 readers managed adequate comprehension; at 80%, none did. Reaching 98% takes roughly 8,000–9,000 word families, and you won’t get there looking each one up twice. On retention: in Waring and Takaki’s graded-reader study, three months after reading, learners could translate about one of the 25 new words they’d met. Even words encountered 18+ times fell from 42% recall to 6%. Reliable incidental learning seems to need 8–10 encounters per word, and the wild won’t reliably provide them. Reading hands you the right words, then quietly takes them back. Capture is how you keep them.

Why the notebook doesn’t work

The traditional fix is a vocabulary notebook. Almost everyone tries it; almost nobody sustains it. Capture costs too much: stopping to write pulls you out of the text, so you start skipping exactly the words you were least sure about. The record is too thin: “cumbre — summit” drops the sense, the sentence, and the grammar, so a month later it’s a puzzle, not a memory. And decisively, nothing brings the words back: a notebook is write-only. The one controlled study of vocabulary notebooks found they helped, but only under sustained teacher direction; the hoped-for independent habit never formed. A system that needs someone standing over it isn’t one you’ll run alone on a tired evening.

What a saved word actually needs

Four things separate a record from a memory: the sense you met, not all eight dictionary senses; a real example sentence, ideally the one you found it in, because the sentence carries the grammar, register, and collocations a gloss drops; near-zero friction, meaning one tap or highlight, which rules out picking a deck at capture time (see spaced repetition without making decks); and a schedule, because the word has to come back just before you’d lose it, and that timing is bookkeeping, the part worth handing to software. The mechanics are in how spaced repetition actually works.

The system, in four moves

  1. Read slightly above your level. Stopping more than a few times a page means the text is fighting you; the coverage research says drop down.
  2. Capture without stopping. Highlight or tap; reading is the thing producing the vocabulary.
  3. Save the sense and the sentence. A bare gloss leaves you reconstructing context from nothing.
  4. Review on a schedule you didn’t choose. Your own judgement will pick the words you already know.

Choosing a tool? We wrote down what actually matters in a spaced repetition vocabulary app.

What to expect

Not a dramatic first month. Vocabulary built this way accumulates quietly, then becomes obvious all at once, usually when you notice you’ve read several pages without stopping. What changes first is friction: fewer interruptions, and the ones left are real unknowns. The prize is real: the most frequent 3,000 word families cover about 96% of everyday speech, and reading hands you those words in an order that reflects your own life rather than someone else’s syllabus. But only if you keep them.

Where Lexicamp fits

Lexicamp is built for exactly this loop: look a word up, save it in one tap with its sense and an example sentence attached, and it comes back on an FSRS schedule timed to just before you’d have forgotten it. No lesson tree, no list someone else picked. Free to start, works between any two languages, runs on iPhone. Here’s how the loop works.

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