One word, many forms: a reader that remembers

You know the word. Do you know this form?

You recognize the German verb gehen—“to go.” Then you meet geht, or the less familiar ging. They belong to the same word, but recognizing one does not mean the others will come naturally.

That is a normal part of learning a language. A useful reading companion should remember the connection without assuming you have mastered every form.

Satzlang tracks both: the underlying word and the particular forms you have read. Its highlights make that history visible, so you can spend less time managing vocabulary and more time understanding sentences.

The word behind the spelling

A dictionary usually groups a word’s forms under a base form, sometimes called a lemma. The German forms gehe, geht and ging all lead back to gehen. Likewise, Buch and Bücher are forms of the same noun: “book” and “books.”

Satzlang makes those connections too. Your experience with one form becomes a useful clue when another appears. A change in tense, number or grammatical case does not automatically turn a familiar word into an entirely new vocabulary item.

The word’s role matters as well. A noun and a verb are kept separate even if they happen to share a spelling. The aim is to connect different forms of the same word—not to bundle unrelated words together.

Colour is a clue, not a verdict

Think of the highlight as Satzlang’s current confidence in your familiarity with a word and the form in front of you. It is a guide based on your reading, not a test result or a measured probability.

If you previously read that exact form without help, it can appear without a highlight. If you needed to look it up, it receives a stronger highlight. When you have only met another form of the word, the shading reflects that partial familiarity: the word is not entirely new, but this version may still need attention.

For example, reading geht comfortably gives Satzlang a reason to treat ging as connected to something familiar. It does not tell the reader that you already recognize ging. If you look it up, the app remembers that this particular form needed help, even if you later read a different form easily.

The distinction is simple: “I have met this word” is not the same as “I recognize this form.”

Your reading keeps the picture up to date

There is no separate vocabulary checklist to maintain. Read for meaning, ask for help when you need it, and finish the sentence with your difficulty feedback.

For vocabulary tracking, a word’s latest completed encounter is what matters. Reading it without looking it up or leaving it marked as unfamiliar counts as evidence of familiarity. Looking it up—or leaving it marked as unfamiliar—records that it still needs attention. Sentences skipped as too hard do not update that vocabulary picture.

This is deliberately an estimate. You might infer a word from context, forget it later, or struggle with a new form. The reader can update its picture as those encounters happen; “known” is not a permanent badge of mastery.

Your statistics page follows the same idea. Different forms are grouped under one dictionary word, with separate entries for different grammatical roles. You can see your vocabulary growing without counting every conjugation as a brand-new word. The reader still remembers which individual forms were comfortable and which needed help.

A reading companion that remembers the connection

Words change shape. Your reading history should not lose the connection when they do.

By remembering both the base word and its individual forms, Satzlang gives you a more useful picture of what is familiar, what is new, and what still deserves another look. You keep reading; the picture develops with you.