Hello Amazing Developers,
Thank you for making Language Reactor. I can’t overstate how helpful it is for me as a language learner. That said, I have a couple requests regarding phrasepump. Particularly tends to feed me an overwhelming amount of new language. In introducing a suggested word, the sentence in which it is presented, may introduce several other unknown words. In theory, learners should be able to understand (to some degree) the meaning of the newly introduced word by inferring it from the context in which it’s presented. But this is impossible if the context is also unknown. Now, you might say, “Well, even if you don’t understand it all, it’s still good exposure.” Be that as it may, there’s no need for additional exposure. We all have infinite exposure at our fingertips through youtube, netflix, etc. What is harder to come across is comprehensible input. My suggestion is this: Program phrasepump to introduce new/unknown words in sentences that are made up of only words that the user has already marked to ‘known’. And, when phrasepump wants to feed us a sentence that contains a new grammar structure, the sentence should be composed only of known words. Otherwise it is not comprehensible input and therefore not helpful for learning the newly introduced word/grammar item.
In addition, it would be wonderful if users could customize phrasepump to feed us only selected words and phrases in a given session. Please hear me out. As you are aware, it is vastly easier to remember a word when it is associated with something else in the memory. For me, I like to take a section of content from a book or episode, read through it, create a set of flash cards containing all the new material I came across, and then review those flash cards in tandem with reviewing the section of content from which I created them. I know this isn’t exactly the philosophy behind language reactor, but hear me out. It still works very well and here’s why: In reviewing the flash cards in tandem with the content from which they were created, not only the words but also their context gets drilled into the brain. The result is a network of associations (in the brain) with the new words being learned. This functions similarly to a ‘mind palace’ in that, at any time, even if I can’t recall the exact word, I can recall the context in which I studied it. Likewise, I can retrace the my steps through the context back to the word. I can’t tell you how many words I have seared into my long-term memory from studying with this approach. I know you’ve already provided the option of exporting marked words and phrases to anki and quizlet but, frankly, it’s quite cumbersome. And, well, it seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult to simply make phrasepump customizable so that we could review only select words and phrases within a given session. Developers, this feature in particular would make all the difference for me as a paying user.
Thank you for your consideration.
Kind Regards,
Doug