Etch: Write to Remember

Note: Etch's interface and its AI-generated definitions are in Chinese. It is built for Chinese speakers learning English.

I built Etch because vocabulary never stuck for me.

Words I looked up were gone the next day. My dictionary app held hundreds of saved words and not one of them had become mine. What I eventually understood is that the problem was not recall — it was writing. Reading a word ten times does less than writing it once. Psychologists call this the generation effect: producing the answer yourself leaves a far stronger trace than reading it.

So Etch does one thing well. It makes you write the word.

Capture without leaving what you're reading

A Shortcut pulls the selected word in along with the sentence it appeared in. The sentence where you met the word is the sentence you'll see again at review time — words stripped of context are the hardest to keep.

The entry fills itself in

Pronunciation, definitions, example sentences, morpheme breakdown and common collocations arrive a few seconds after you add the word. Senses are ordered to fit the sentence you captured, rather than copied from a dictionary in fixed order.

Review by writing, not by recognizing

Write with a finger or Apple Pencil, get judged the moment you finish, and see letter by letter where you went wrong. Three modes: write from the meaning, write from the pronunciation, or fill the blank in a sentence. Recognizing a word is not the same as being able to write it — that difference is the whole point of Etch.

Scheduling is handled for you

Etch uses FSRS, which tracks real forgetting curves more closely than classic SM-2. Each word comes back on the day you're about to lose it — not earlier, not later.

One vocabulary across Mac and iPhone

Capture on the Mac, review on the iPhone, progress syncs both ways. A home screen widget keeps today's words in front of you, and the ink darkens as you finish them.

Etch is free, carries no ads, and does not sell your data. You can export your whole vocabulary at any time, and delete your account from inside the app.