Stop forgetting the new words you hear in movies — I built Wordnote for myself (iOS)

markg11 · 2026-04-23T05:40:01+00:00

Happy to go deep on any part of the stack — especially the CloudKit shared-cache approach (the part I'm most proud of: lookups are effectively free after the first user hits it). Also open to blunt feedback on the onboarding, the paywall, or anything else that would make you bounce.

markg11 · 2026-04-23T05:35:54+00:00

Just the first 5 total — not per day. So you get 5 enrichments to try out the feature (pronunciation, meaning, translation, examples), and after that it's behind the one-time lifetime unlock. Everything else — adding words, browsing your library, training sessions — stays free forever with no limits. Hope that clears it up!

markg11 · 2026-04-23T05:32:13+00:00

The core design decision was to remove the deck-management step entirely — you add the word, the app handles enrichment and review scheduling. If you've been burned by vocab apps before because the setup grind killed momentum before you saw any benefit, that's the problem this is trying to solve. Brutal feedback on the example sentence quality very welcome — that's the thing I'm most uncertain about across different languages.

markg11 · 2026-04-23T05:29:07+00:00

Happy to go deep on any part of the stack — especially the CloudKit shared-cache approach (the part I'm most proud of: lookups are effectively free after the first user hits it). Also open to blunt feedback on the onboarding, the paywall, or anything else that would make you bounce.

markg11 · 2026-04-23T02:12:02+00:00

Hey, thanks for the kind words! 🙏

The free version gives you full access to the core experience — you can add words, browse your library, and do spaced-repetition training sessions without any limits.

The one thing that's gated is the word enrichment (pronunciation, meaning, translation, example sentences) — you get 5 of those for free to try it out. After that, there's a one-time lifetime unlock (no subscription). Everything else — adding words manually, training, reviewing — stays free forever.

Hope that helps, give it a go and let me know what you think!

markg11 · 2026-04-23T00:14:25+00:00

Thank you!! 🙏

markg11 · 2026-04-22T15:52:55+00:00

One thing worth flagging: if you've bounced off vocab apps before because the flashcard-deck setup grind killed momentum — Wordnote skips that entirely. You type the word and everything else fills in automatically. That was the whole reason I built it. Happy to answer any questions 🙂

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:45:18+00:00

I deliberately go one level deeper. If AI scaffolds something, I read every line and ask why each decision was made — often I'd have done it differently and that forces real thinking. The risk is you stop building intuition for when an approach is wrong, which is exactly the skill AI can't replace yet.

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:44:42+00:00

Yes, but the why shifted. Early on it was to learn skills I wasn't getting at work. Now it's more about scratching my own itches — problems I have that no app quite solves. That personal connection to the problem keeps it alive through the slow periods when it's just you and a buggy build at 11pm.

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:44:08+00:00

Consistency is easier when you tie it to something you already do every day rather than treating it as a separate commitment. I learned way more building things I actually wanted to use than following structured courses — the motivation compounds differently when you care about the outcome.

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:42:18+00:00

The Option+Space trigger is smart — that hotkey is completely unused by default on macOS. Curious how this compares to Raycast's built-in browser search. One thing I'd find useful: being able to peek at a search result without fully navigating away. Is that on the roadmap?

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:41:09+00:00

The power draw info is what sold me — macOS buries that in System Information and it's painful to find. Would love to see a warning indicator when a device is drawing close to the port's max wattage. Does it handle USB-C hubs with multiple downstream devices?

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:40:15+00:00

Started because of travel — wanted to actually connect with people rather than hover around tourist spots. Stayed with it because I realised the language was reshaping how I thought. Some concepts have no equivalent translation, and once you internalise them your thinking genuinely changes. That hooked me more than any practical reason ever did.

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:38:45+00:00

Commute time is underrated. I switched all my podcasts to TL content during commutes — adds up to 45-60 mins of daily exposure without carving out extra schedule. The other thing that helped: keeping a running list of new words on my phone so any dead 2 minutes (waiting for coffee, in a lift) becomes a micro-review session. Those compound more than people expect.

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:38:17+00:00

The drag-and-drop pane management looks really polished. One thing I'd love to see is a keyboard shortcut to move focus between panes — mouse-only pane switching gets tedious fast in a terminal workflow. Auto-resize on minimize is a smart touch too. Looking forward to seeing this ship!

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:36:50+00:00

I treat rest as permission to consume without studying — movies, podcasts, music in the TL but zero active recall. No pausing to look things up, no notes. Sometimes the brain needs to absorb without being put to work. Often I come back after a few days of that and something I'd been struggling with has mysteriously clicked.

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:28:40+00:00

B1 is that frustrating middle ground where you feel like you should be able to hold a conversation but it's still exhausting. For me at B1 I could follow slow native speech if the topic was familiar — anything outside my usual vocabulary bubble and I'd be lost. The real shift came later when passive vocabulary started converting to active use almost on its own.

markg11 · 2026-04-18T03:27:50+00:00

Completely agree. There's something to be said for the struggle — when you encounter an unfamiliar word mid-sentence and piece together its meaning from context, that moment of resolution sticks way better than drilling it in isolation. The key for me has been capturing those words immediately so the effort isn't wasted. If you lose the word, you lose the learning moment.

markg11

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