Most language learners have the same workflow:
- Read in the target language.
- Hit an unknown word.
- Switch tab to a dictionary.
- Look it up.
- Lose the thread of what they were reading.
- Eventually return.
- Forget the new word by tomorrow.
Forty seconds per word, multiple tabs, broken focus. After an hour you've actually read for fifteen minutes.
This is the workflow that replaces it. Two seconds per word, never leave the source, every new word saved and ready for review.
The friction tax
Before fixing the workflow, name the costs:
Time tax. A 20-word lookup session at 30 seconds each is 10 minutes of switching, scrolling, and re-finding your place. Multiply across a week of reading and it's hours.
Focus tax. Each tab switch is a context loss. Research on task-switching is consistent: every interruption costs 20-30 seconds of re-engagement even after the interruption ends. Reading becomes choppy.
Retention tax. Words looked up in isolation, then mentally discarded as you return to the text, are 80% forgotten within 24 hours. You re-look up the same word a week later.
A pronunciation workflow that eliminates these three taxes is the unlock for sustained intermediate-to-advanced progress.
The 2-second workflow
Three actions, three results, no tab switching.
1. Select the word. Mouse highlight or keyboard selection — wherever you are. PDF reader, browser, ebook app, subtitle player, chat message.
2. Press Alt+Q. IPAtics sends the text to its API, detects the language automatically, and returns IPA in a floating overlay. The overlay sits over your reading surface — your place in the text doesn't move.
3. Decide what to do. From the overlay, three options:
- Hear it. Speaker icon plays native TTS audio.
- Save it. Star icon adds the word to your library with the IPA, context sentence, and timestamp.
- Flashcard it. Card icon generates six Anki card types calibrated to your CEFR level and sends them to your running Anki app.
That's the loop. Two seconds for the IPA + audio. Five seconds if you also save and generate a card.
What it looks like in practice
A reading session, condensed:
I'm reading a German Süddeutsche Zeitung article on my laptop. I hit durchwachsen — a word I haven't seen before. I select it, press Alt+Q.
Overlay shows /ˈdʊʁçˌvaksn̩/ instantly. I tap /ç/ to confirm it's the ich-Laut, then /ɐ̯/ at the end to remember it's the weakened /r/.
Speaker icon — native German voice says it. I repeat it once.
Star icon — saved to library with the surrounding sentence as context.
Card icon — six Anki cards generated. The Vocabulary card shows the German→English translation, the Production card shows German→explanation, the Sentence Cloze uses the article sentence with durchwachsen blanked out.
I'm back to reading the article. Maybe seven seconds elapsed. I never left the article window.
The compounding
The reason this workflow is worth the install:
- A 30-minute reading session yields 15-25 saved words, each with 6 cards, all native-audio'd.
- A week of daily sessions = 100+ unique words, 600+ review items.
- A month = 400+ unique words at six recall axes each.
Compare that to the manual workflow's actual word retention rate (~20% after a week) and the gap is order-of-magnitude.
Where the workflow saves the most time
PDFs and academic texts. Most dictionaries don't handle academic vocabulary well. IPAtics gives you IPA on any technical term in any of 14 languages. See how IPA-from-PDF works, including scanned files read via OCR.
Subtitle reading. Drama series, news clips, lectures. Pause, select the subtitle word, get IPA. No more "what did they say?"
Chat and casual reading. Tandem partner messages, language learning forums, in-app text. Pop-up button mode (click instead of hotkey) handles these gracefully.
Image-embedded text. Screenshot OCR mode extracts text from PDFs without selectable layers, scanned books, image-only documents. Then transcribes.
Where the workflow doesn't apply
Speaking practice without text. This is a reading-to-pronunciation pipeline. For speaking practice without a source text, use the Speech Analyzer feature instead — record yourself, get phoneme-level scoring, drill specific sounds. To train rhythm and intonation, pair it with the shadowing technique.
Languages outside the supported 14. English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Turkish, Arabic. If you study Hindi, Vietnamese, Thai, or Hebrew, you'll have to wait for additions or use other tools.
Group study. This is a single-user desktop tool. Group sessions in a classroom need a different setup.
Setting up the workflow
Three things:
- Install IPAtics. Free download for macOS and Windows. Or try the free web version for single-word lookups without install.
- Set your target language and CEFR level in preferences (one minute).
- Open Anki (if you want flashcards) and the AnkiConnect add-on.
You're ready. Open any text in any app. Select. Hotkey. Done.
The minimum routine
If you do one thing daily for a month, do this:
20 minutes of target-language reading. Look up every unfamiliar word in the workflow above. Save the ones you'll see again. Generate Anki cards for the ones you want to memorize.
The compounding shows up in week three. By month three you'll wonder how you read before.
Download IPAtics free and try it for a week. If your reading sessions don't get longer and your vocabulary intake doesn't increase, uninstall.
Related reading: How I built a pronunciation Anki deck in 10 minutes · IELTS pronunciation: the IPA sounds examiners listen for · The Anki + IPA pronunciation workflow · Online IPA converters vs desktop apps