Phrasepump request

Request
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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

1 Like
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Hi Doug

Thanks for your contribution. Phrasepump tries to feed you sentences based on the words you already know but it might not always succeed. I don’t know what language(s) you are learning but this is based on my experience. There might not be enough human translated sentences to find a good fit and machine translated sentences might not be reliable enough. The word might be used in a specific domain or context a lot of the time, so even if you do not know the other words in that domain or context the exposure is still necessary. Even if you do know the words in a sentence it doesn’t mean you know the idiomatic meaning, so even then you have to get comfortable with some uncertainty. You may (like me) have told Phrasepump you know the first x most common words because you know most of them, then sometimes it is working from an incorrect base. It may be possible to get some grasp on how difficult the sentences are from how long users spend studying them, this could then be used to tune the difficulty, but this would be a long process.

I think you are saying you want the words in a session to have some relation to each other. I can imagine a feature where words/phrases saved from the same source (like a movie) are presented together, if you had to select each word/phrase for that session it would be extremely laborious.

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It seems like you might be referring to a specific forum discussion. Would you like help crafting a comment or response to the post? Feel free to share what you’d like to express.