You Can Read the Alphabet — So Why Can't You Read a Single Sentence?

You spent weeks learning Gurmukhi. You can recite every letter. You open a Punjabi news site and — nothing. The words blur together. You're sounding out each character one by one, and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you've forgotten how it started.

If you've ever learned a script that isn't the Latin alphabet — whether that's Devanagari, Hangul, Arabic, Cyrillic, Thai, or any other — you know this feeling. You know the letters. You just can't read.

The gap nobody talks about

Think about how you read English. When you see the word “breakfast,” you don't process B-R-E-A-K-F-A-S-T. You see the shape and instantly know the meaning. Your brain built that shortcut from seeing the word thousands of times over your lifetime.

Now look at this: ਨਾਸ਼ਤਾ

Even if you know every Gurmukhi letter, you're still sounding it out: ਨ...ਾ...ਸ਼...ਤ...ਾ. By the time you piece together “nashta” (breakfast), your working memory is spent. String five words like that into a sentence and you've lost the plot entirely.

This isn't a knowledge problem. It's an exposure problem. You learned the decoding rules, but your brain hasn't seen these words enough times to recognize them on sight. That shift — from letter-by-letter decoding to instant recognition — only comes from seeing the same words over and over in real contexts.

Why “just go read something” doesn't work

The usual advice is to start reading children's books or simple articles. Sounds reasonable. In practice, it's brutal. When every third word requires manual decoding, you're not reading — you're solving puzzles. It's exhausting, it kills your motivation, and most people quit within a week.

The problem isn't effort. It's that full-page immersion is too much too soon. You need exposure to new-script words, but mixed in with content you can already process — not a wall of unfamiliar text.

What actually works: words swapped into pages you already read

This is the idea behind Vocabo. It's a browser extension that replaces individual words on the pages you're already browsing with their equivalents in the language you're learning.

Here's what that looks like in practice: You're reading an English article about cooking. The word “breakfast” gets replaced with ਨਾਸ਼ਤਾ right there in the sentence. The surrounding English gives you full context, so you're never lost. You see the word, you absorb the shape, and you move on. No flashcard app. No study session. Just your normal browsing, with a few words swapped out.

See how it works in under a minute — watch the demo ▶

Over days and weeks, something shifts. Words you used to sound out letter by letter start looking familiar. You see ਨਾਸ਼ਤਾ and your brain says “breakfast” without the decoding step. That's the pattern recognition kicking in — the same thing that makes English effortless for you.

It scales with you

Vocabo starts with common, high-frequency words and gradually increases as you get comfortable. You control the pace. Some days you'll barely notice the swapped words because your brain is already recognizing them. That's the point.

When you spot a word you want to hold onto, tap it to save it to your Vocabulary Bank — a personal collection you can review anytime. Every saved word comes with audio pronunciation so you can hear how it actually sounds, not just how you think it sounds from the letters.

And if you ever want to know what a replaced word means, just hover over it. The original pops right up.

This works for any script you can't read yet

We built Vocabo because the “alphabet → fluency” gap hits hardest with unfamiliar scripts. But it's not just for Punjabi. If you're learning Japanese and kanji still looks like abstract art, this helps. If you're learning Korean and Hangul blocks still need conscious assembly, this helps. Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Russian, Greek, Hebrew — if the script is the bottleneck, Vocabo is built for exactly that.

It also works for languages that share your alphabet but have unfamiliar vocabulary — Spanish, French, German. The word-replacement approach builds recognition regardless of script. But it's a game-changer for scripts where even looking at a word feels like work.

Stop deciphering. Start recognizing.

You don't need another alphabet chart. You don't need to force yourself through children's books. You need your brain to see target-language words thousands of times in contexts that make sense — and Vocabo does that while you browse the web you were going to browse anyway.