About

Lexitera keeps your word lists and decides what to ask today. Here is how it decides, and what to do when the ready-made dictionaries fall short.

• How it works

  Ready-made dictionaries are ordered by frequency: the ordinary words a sentence cannot do without come first, the rare ones wait their turn. A word you typed in yourself is unknown — nothing is known about it yet, so it starts neither first nor last.

  Every word climbs a ladder of repetitions. Get it right, and it moves up — the next meeting is put off a little further each time. Get it wrong, and it drops back down, no mercy. The lower steps ask for the translation, the higher ones ask you to write the word itself, article included where the language has one.

• Your own words

  The ready-made dictionaries cover far less than what you actually read. So a list has «Paste text»: drop in a page from a book, an article, anything, and the app finds the words itself, brings them to their dictionary form, and fills in a translation where it has one. «Went» becomes «go».

  Typing is optional — a photo works too: a page, a sign, a café menu, anything with letters on it. The picture turns into the same text and takes the same road from there. The trick is not free, so photos are capped per day — how many are left shows before you spend one.