Why
Around that time I wanted to get serious about English. The biggest problem when reading English articles was still vocabulary: a few unknown words in a paragraph and I couldn’t keep going.
Version one: select words in the browser
I started on September 17, 2026, with a Chrome extension. Select some text on a web page, a small dot appears at the corner of the selection, and clicking it opens a word card.
- AI picks 0 to 3 words or phrases worth learning from the selection, gives their base form, and explains what they mean in that sentence, in Chinese;
- single words can also be looked up in Merriam-Webster for phonetics, audio and an English definition;
- once confirmed, the word goes into a vocabulary database in Notion. If a word comes up again, it isn’t duplicated: it counts another encounter and keeps the latest sentence.
Once it was done, I felt it wasn’t really needed.
Version two: a desktop app for reviewing
The next day I built a desktop app just for review:
- A daily queue: words due for review and new words are kept apart, and you start new ones yourself, three at a time;
- Context cards: first just the word; tap for an example sentence, tap again for the answer. Examples prefer real sentences different from the one you saved, and rotate with each review;
- Scheduling: FSRS, with four ratings (forgot, fuzzy, remembered, easy) deciding when you see a card next;
- PDF reading: open a local PDF in the app, select a word to look it up and add it to your list; highlights and notes are written back into the original PDF;
- Progress: reviews over the last seven days, your streak, and how your ratings break down.
Data lives in a local SQLite database, with keys stored encrypted. This version worked too, and the more I used it, the more I felt it wasn’t really needed either.
Finally: folded into WenweiOS
On October 6 I merged the extension and the desktop app into one repository, planning to redesign it, and then stopped. Reading English, looking up words and reviewing them ended up happening inside WenweiOS, where I read while talking with AI and new words go straight into my knowledge base.
Looking back, Word Pebble was my third tool for “read English, collect words”: the Anki flashcard script in 2022, Read Flow in 2025, and this one.