gwyner Pentaglot Newbie United States Joined 5948 days ago 23 posts - 75 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchC1, GermanC1, ItalianB1, Russian Studies: Hungarian
| Message 1 of 5 28 January 2013 at 3:46pm | IP Logged |
I've been manually searching 4 websites (2 dictionaries, Forvo and Google Images) for every word I learn. Last night, I
found out about iMacro. I click a button, it prompts me for my word, and in 4 seconds, I have 4 tabs full of preloaded
information about my word. Sweetness.
Check it out here, and if you use it,
let me know what combinations of websites you use in the comments section.
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Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 2 of 5 28 January 2013 at 7:31pm | IP Logged |
One question; how do you deal with the excess information? I'm not saying my experience has to apply to anyone else, but I made the experience that the easier information is available, the less likely I am to recall it later, regardless of whether I review it or not. What makes me recognize and recall is the mental effort I invest towards understanding what a word means and how it works in a sentence before I look it up or ask someone else. Consciously deciding whether to look up a term in a dictionary, a sentence database, an encyclopedia or do an image search also facilitates recall.
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maurelio1234 Triglot Groupie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6078 days ago 61 posts - 92 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Mandarin
| Message 3 of 5 29 January 2013 at 9:40pm | IP Logged |
I stopped using dictionaries when reading in my target languages online: it's too slow!
Now, I only use popup dictionaries.
I think it's a matter of priorities: I want to read for pleasure, so I need to read a
text as fast as possible, with the most comprehension as possible. In order to do that
you need to get as less information as possible each time you look at the dictionary,
that's why I use a popup one.
It's obvious this strategy can only work if you do a serious job in learning at least
the
1000 most common words in your target language.
By the way, sometimes dictionaries are useless... the further is your target language
from your mother language, the more examples you need to really "get" the meaning of a
word.
Edited by maurelio1234 on 29 January 2013 at 9:45pm
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maurelio1234 Triglot Groupie BrazilRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6078 days ago 61 posts - 92 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Mandarin
| Message 4 of 5 29 January 2013 at 9:45pm | IP Logged |
Bao wrote:
One question; how do you deal with the excess information? I'm not saying
my experience has to apply to anyone else, but I made the experience that the easier
information is available, the less likely I am to recall it later, regardless of
whether I review it or not. What makes me recognize and recall is the mental effort I
invest towards understanding what a word means and how it works in a sentence
before I look it up or ask someone else. Consciously deciding whether to look up
a term in a dictionary, a sentence database, an encyclopedia or do an image search also
facilitates recall. |
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Another thing that helps a lot is "how many times you looked up the same word in the
dictionary before" :). The information maybe very easily available, but if you look at
the dictionary many times, at some point, you brain can find the meaning of a word more
easily in your memory than in the dictionary, and then, you got a new word in your
vocabulary! ;)
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gwyner Pentaglot Newbie United States Joined 5948 days ago 23 posts - 75 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchC1, GermanC1, ItalianB1, Russian Studies: Hungarian
| Message 5 of 5 29 January 2013 at 11:17pm | IP Logged |
I only use the information once, to assemble my Anki cards. I don't allow English into my cards, so I need to find
good illustrated contexts for each word, which is why I try to collect as much as possible in the beginning.
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