Optimize Language Learning with Reverso Context

hi my name is north this is my channel north and his books where i talk about language learning strategies and in this video i want to address an issue that i've had myself in the past and that i still see on the internet on reddit on youtube asked about so frequently which is uh basically one of those questions that you have to ask yourself when you try to go from a lower intermediate level to when you've sort of already learned the basic words like house and family and the basic verbs and the basic grammar of the language to a more advanced level where you can comfortably read and listen to a wide variety of topics without having to translate every two seconds a lot of people use applications like anki as sort of decks of huge thousands and thousands of cards that they review every single day whether you use anki or another application or you use simply an actual physical flash cards or any other method you quickly find that the number of words and expressions that you have to learn increases dramatically and by the time you're trying to go from say below b1 up to a b2 or c1 level you have thousands and thousands of new words that you have to learn and it becomes very hard to find a way to add these words into your vocabulary in an efficient manner when i first started learning languages what i would do when i got to that lower intermediate level was that i would go through a book that i was reading and i would try to a work of fiction for example and i would find words that i didn't know and i would stop reading the book and i would write down the word or maybe i would underline it in the book itself and then perhaps at the end of a few pages i would have a list of words and then i have to go on my computer and type up those words and find out what they meant and maybe double check because you don't want to have a bad translation and then add them to my anki deck and then i'd be able to start learning them and this this helped and i did use this method with success to a certain extent but it wasn't particularly efficient it took a very long time i mean if you're at a lower intermediate level and you read an average novel one page of that novel will have a ton of words you'll know and also for me at least the act of reading a book is is pleasurable it gives me joy and you really can't get lost in the book at all if you keep stopping to to write down things every two seconds it makes it very very arduous and i know on the other hand there are people who take the exact opposite approach which is that instead of adding words themselves to their own deck they'll search for for example a pre-made anki deck with 20 000 phrases or words and they'll simply add it on to their computer or smartphone and then they'll go through it like a zombie and then you know a year later they come on to their forum or whatever or they think to themselves well i can recognize the word or phrase in the context of anki but i can't recognize it out in the wild so to speak if someone on youtube or in a conversation says something that i i should know i i can't recognize it because i don't have a blank white screen with the word staring at me where i have all the time i need to sort of think about it and then press a button to tell my computer how much of that word i know uh so you have to find a balance between taking the easy way out and simply mass adding things without thinking about it and uh taking a really long amount of time by physically going through a book and adding everything bit by bit like i said before once you get to the point where you have thousands of words to learn it becomes very difficult to do this and what i've found works best for me and i do it at this point about 45 minutes a day is i use a website called reverso context reversal context is an online website that provides translation and it gives you the word that you've typed in in context so in sentences from text of some sort that were uploaded to the website for example if you wanted to look up the word uh if you wanted to to find look up the word to admonish the verb in english you could find a translation into german and you could see that translation in many different sentences so you can see many different contexts for the word this is obviously a lot better than something like google translate which will just give you a single word as it is sort of in the wild or just by itself standing alone and what i would do is i would watch videos on the internet because it's easiest since i'm already on a computer and i'm not physically using a book it is much faster to take a pause a video and then type the word onto the computer because i'm already on a computer and i would look for words or expressions or phrases that i don't really get i will type them into reversal context i will see all the different translations that they have and then i will simply copy paste the translation or the sentence which best fits what that word probably means into my anki deck and then i add it so for example uh today i i'm trying to learn dutch and i found a youtube channel where basically it's an interviewer and an academic or an expert a philosopher of some sort sitting in and they spend about half an hour talking about some issue for example interesting since i'm learning dutch but for example the difficulties the dutch language is facing now that everything is more and more in english so this is a topic of discussion you had two people speaking and obviously they used a lot of expressions and rich words because these are people who you know dedicate a large portion of their lives to discussing and thinking about these important issues and i'm sitting there and every 30 or 40 seconds i found something that i didn't know some verb which maybe i had some knowledge of but not complete knowledge of or some phrase for example how do the dutch say to go too far there are a number of ways one can say that in any language or to cross the line and they use a certain expression meaning that and i then switch tabs i type it into reversal context if it's a real expression that is used commonly then it will be there on the website there is a huge number of sentences in their database and i quickly scan through the list of translations and i picked the sentence which i felt best sort of gave me a good embodiment of what that word or expression meant and then i alt tab again i have my anki up adding a new card and i copy paste english on the bottom and dutch on the top and using this method i was able to add a total of about 90 i go from around 80 to 120 cards a day with this which means obviously since there are two cards for every uh word i add about 50 words a day to my dutch deck with this method i also get to practice in the meantime one i get to listen to something i find interesting and two i get to practice my reading comprehension because i'm watching something with subtitles which is not something i always do sometimes obviously have to listen to things without subtitles or else you always rely on them but i'm listening and i'm practicing and i'm learning these new words and i'm also adding them and the great thing is that because you're using a dictionary that provides context and example sentences you get to see the word first in the video that you're watching so you have one use of the word and then you get to see a whole list of other uses of the word so you can then choose the one that best fits so as opposed to simply looking up a word in a list what does admonish mean and what's the word to admonish in german you see that verb there just sitting there by itself and then you've never really seen it used it's not going to sit in your brain nearly as much but because everything's on a computer as opposed to when i was using physical books and then individually underlying words with a highlighter or writing into my little notebook every single time i have a lot less friction so the amount of time that i spend writing something down in a notepad and then transferring my eyes and my brain and my hands to a computer to look it up is time that i'm not really spending on language learning itself i'm spending it on uh it's friction it's it's the effort that i have to go put into just to be able to find the translation but when you have things easily on a pair of websites and your anki deck on a computer it becomes quite a bit faster obviously there are some caveats to the strategy one you need to be able to use your language on the context reversal website they have about a dozen and they've been adding them slowly over time i think even a year and a half ago they only had around eight languages and obviously the dozen languages that they do have are the bigger more popular ones that people tend to learn two the translations may not always be perfect for example i looked up the word a buck in dutch a buck being an animal in this case like the milwaukee bucks basketball team and a number of the sentences basically said hey i shot a dollar with my hunting rifle the other day which is obviously the wrong translation of buck however given that buck is an important enough word or at least it's common enough you could find and i was able to choose that one of the sentences that clearly meant it as an animal and i was able to add it if you were to take a very rare word you would find it fairly difficult to be certain that the translation that you see is perfect earlier in the year i was using this for portuguese and i had a couple of romance novels from the 19th century that i was looking up words and these are words that i couldn't find really on the internet that much i mean they're very uncommon words very literary words that you would see used in a 19th century brazilian brazilian romance novel and some of those words basically aren't really in use anymore so in that case i wasn't really able to rely on the translations whatsoever uh so this will definitely be more useful if you're using words uh that are commonly used they don't have to be the super common words like house and family but even words like admonish or literary or expel or inundate these are all words that are helpful for you to know in the language you're learning and they're also common enough that they're you're gonna be able to find tons of translations um with that in mind that's pretty much all i can say about the subject right now i'm certainly happy to hear your thoughts if you have any and please subscribe for more videos on language learning thank you

Channel: North and His Books

Views: 661

Keywords: language learning, anki, vocabulary, learn spanish, learn german, learn french

Id: VCVcSG4cN74

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021