Read the book inside Paira and tap any word you do not know. A sheet opens with the dictionary entry, the word is pronounced aloud, and one more tap saves it into that book's study set along with the sentence you met it in. You do not keep a separate vocabulary notebook, because the note and the lookup are the same action.
Why the notebook method breaks down
Ask how to learn vocabulary from reading and you will be told to keep a vocabulary log: write down each new word, look it up later, make cards from it at the weekend. It is good advice and almost nobody sustains it, because it asks you to stop reading, switch tools, and then do the same work a second time later.
The cost is not the writing. It is the interruption. A novel you are enjoying at twenty pages an hour becomes a novel you are processing at six, and the enjoyment is the only reason you were reading in the target language in the first place.
What a tap actually does
Tapping a word opens a sheet with four things in it:
- The dictionary entry, with the part of speech and the senses, resolved to the word's base form rather than the inflected form on the page
- The word spoken aloud, automatically, if your device has a voice for that language
- A translation of the whole sentence, on demand — you ask for it, so a word you only half-needed does not cost you one
- Save, which adds the word to this book's set, or ignore, which stops it prompting you again
Saving stores three fields: the term, the definition, and the sentence you tapped it in as the example. That third field is the one that matters, and it is the reason this beats copying words into a list by hand.
Why the sentence is the important part
A word saved on its own is a word you will later fail to recognise, because you learned a label rather than a use. "Bear" as a bare entry is ambiguous and forgettable. "Bear" in the sentence where a character could not bear the silence is neither.
Collecting that sentence by hand is exactly the step people skip when they are tired, which is why hand-built lists tend to be bare pairs. Here it is captured automatically, because the app already knows which sentence you tapped in.
The set builds itself while you read
Each book gets its own set, and the words accumulate in it as you go. By the time you finish a chapter you have a set of exactly the words that chapter demanded of you — not a generic frequency list, and not somebody else's idea of intermediate vocabulary.
From there it behaves like any other set. Every saved word starts at mastery zero and enters the normal review schedule, so the words from chapter one come back while you are reading chapter four.
How those saved words get scheduled for review
Which books
You can upload your own in TXT or EPUB, and an uploaded book stays private to you. There is also a library of public-domain works to read directly — English titles from Project Gutenberg, Turkish titles from Wikisource.
The book's language and the language you want definitions in are separate settings, so reading English with Turkish definitions and reading Turkish with English definitions both work the same way.