Add an example sentence to a word and you are storing a use rather than a label. In Paira there are two ways to do it: put a third column in the file you import, or tap the word while reading, which saves the sentence you met it in automatically. Both end up in the same field on the same word.
What a bare pair leaves out
Take a pair like "keen" and its translation. You can learn that pair perfectly and still not know that a person is keen on something, that a blade is keen in a different sense, and that describing your manager as keen means something slightly pointed. The pair is true and almost useless.
This is the gap people notice when they can pass their own flashcards but freeze in conversation. The recall is working. The knowledge behind it is thinner than the recall suggests, because it was stored as a two-item lookup rather than as a thing that appears in sentences.
Adding examples to an import
Use a third column with the same separator as the first two:
- keen - hevesli - She is keen on early starts.
- brittle - kırılgan - The plastic went brittle in the cold.
One rule to know: the third column is only read as an example when more than half your lines have three fields. A file where two lines out of fifty have an example will treat that extra text as part of the definition instead. Either give most rows an example or give none.
The full import format, column by column
Letting the sentence come to you
Writing fifty example sentences by hand is a chore, and the sentences you invent tend to be flat, because you write them out of the definition you just read.
Reading is the cheaper source. When you tap an unfamiliar word in Paira's reader, the sentence around it is saved with the word. You did not compose it, it is real language, and it is the exact context in which the word mattered to you — which makes it a better memory hook than anything you would have constructed.
How reading builds a set as you go
Keep them short
An example earns its place by showing the word doing its job. A twelve-word sentence does that. A forty-word sentence with three subordinate clauses makes you re-read the whole thing every time the word comes up, and the cost lands on every future review, not just the first one.
If a sentence from a book is long, trimming it to the clause that contains the word keeps the context and drops the overhead.