Everyone who reads in the original knows the problem: you look a word up, the meaning is clear, two chapters later it turns up again — and it's blank again. A lookup solves the current second; it leaves no trace. Here's what to do about it without turning reading into drilling.
Why a word you understood doesn't stick
Understanding and remembering are different operations. When you read a translation, your mind answers the question "what does this say" and closes it. Nothing pushes it to retain the word: the meaning has arrived, the word is no longer needed.
Remembering is triggered by something else — retrieval effort. A word stays when you tried to recall it, not when you read the answer. That single detail drives everything below: what helps isn't seeing the translation, it's attempting the translation.
Hence the core flaw of reading with a dictionary: every word arrives pre-solved, and you never once try to pull it out of memory.
The forgetting curve and what to do about it
A new word met once is largely gone within a day — a classic finding that's been reproduced many times since. But forgetting isn't linear: each successful recall stretches how long the word survives. One review after a day, the next after three, then a week, then a month.
That's what makes spaced repetition efficient. It doesn't add repetitions; it places them at the moment a word is about to drop out. Review earlier and you waste time; review later and you're learning it from scratch.
The practical upshot: a word from your book needs its second contact not immediately, but a day or two later. Re-reading the paragraph right away does almost nothing.
What to save and what to let go
The urge to save every unknown word ends in a hundred cards after one chapter and an abandoned deck by day three. One rule works:
Save a word if the sentence fell apart without it. Skip it if the sentence made sense anyway.
This doesn't select "generally useful words" — it selects words already getting in your way, which means they sit at the edge of your active range. Such a word will turn up again (otherwise it wouldn't have bothered you), and it's already tied to the context where you met it.
A rough target: five to eight words per chapter. If you're getting thirty, the book is too heavy — that's not a memory problem.
Why a bare word works worse than a phrase
A word stripped of context is memorised as a pair — foreign term, native term — and that's the most fragile form of knowledge. It collapses the moment the word shows up in another tense, with a different preposition, or figuratively.
A card carrying the sentence from your book does three jobs at once: it fixes the grammatical form, shows what the word combines with, and hooks into a plot you remember. "Remorse" from the paragraph where the character hides a letter comes back far better than the same word sitting in a list of twenty.
So when you save, capture the phrase, not the isolated word.
How many cards a day
Fifteen to twenty reviews a day is a load people sustain for months. That's about five minutes. Beyond forty is a regime that gets dropped within a week — better not to start it.
Consistency matters more than volume. Skipping one day doubles tomorrow's queue; skipping a week turns the deck into a two-hundred-card wall nobody wants to approach. If you do skip, don't clear the backlog in one sitting: postpone half and return to the normal pace.
Active and passive knowledge
There's a difference between "I recognise it when I see it" and "I can produce it when I need it". For reading, recognition is enough, and that's a legitimate goal: a native speaker's passive vocabulary is several times larger than their active one.
If you need production, flip the card: not "word → meaning" but "meaning → word". That's noticeably harder and worth doing only for the two or three hundred words you actually need in speech — not for everything a novel throws at you.
Common mistakes
Saving everything. The deck grows faster than you clear it and becomes a debt within a week.
Learning textbook lists instead of words from your own book. A list gives you words that are useful on average; a book gives you words you'll certainly meet again, because an author reuses their own vocabulary across the whole text.
Reviewing right after reading. It feels productive, but a review five minutes later barely extends retention. Leave it for tomorrow.
Abandoning the deck after a gap. A gap doesn't reset your progress. Only trying to catch up in one evening does.
What this looks like in practice
Twenty minutes of reading, tapping where the sentence collapses, five to eight words saved together with their sentences. Next day, five minutes of cards before the next reading session. After a couple of weeks you'll notice some of what you saved now shows up in the text on its own and no longer needs a lookup.
In Lingible that's one loop: a word from the book is saved with its context on tap and lands in spaced-repetition flashcards — no manual copying into a separate app.