can we click on words in our own pdf files?

This is built and live. It's called Reader — open it here, or find it in the sidebar under Home.

What it does

Upload a PDF or a photo of a page. We pull the text out page by page, then hand it back to you as something you read inside FlexiLingo — with every word tappable, exactly like the podcast player. Tap a word and the meaning comes up in place, with pronunciation, and you can send it to a deck without leaving the page.

Each page also has a Make a deck button. It reads the page you're on, ranks the vocabulary hardest-first and starts with the twelve toughest already selected, so you can finish a page by sending its hard words to a deck instead of stopping to add them one at a time.

What it costs

A normal PDF — one that already has a text layer, which is nearly every ebook and article — is free, up to 1000 pages. A scan or a photo has to go through character recognition, which takes about a second and a half per page, so that part is on the paid plans. If a document is mixed, we read what has text rather than refusing the whole thing.

One thing worth knowing

We delete the original file once the text has been extracted. What stays is the text you're reading and the words you saved. Nobody else can open your documents.

Thanks for writing this up — the detail about losing your place in the sentence is what made the shape of it obvious. It's the whole reason the lookup opens over the page instead of navigating away.

There's a full write-up with a short clip of it in use on the Reader feature page.