[Music] the first one we have here is a um a sentence mining question uh and Eric says I have heard that a lot of successful language learners but when sentence mining mine every word that they don't know regardless of the context and go watch something that most likely has nothing to do with what they studied uh no that's two different Clauses hang on sorry I have heard that a lot of that a lot of plenty I've heard a lot ah so I'm just I can't read I have heard a lot that a plenty of what
no wait oh my God better try try better I'm so sorry I've heard a lot that plenty of successful language Learners when sentence mining mine every word that they don't know regardless of the context and they watch something that likely has nothing to do with what they studied without subtitles in order to grow their listening comprehension is this an effective way to go about sentence mining um shouldn't they just stay in one domain and mind thing is related to that that's the question I think okay um yeah so I think the the key um word
in this question is effective because there's this question of sort of like efficiency of what is the fastest way to acquire a group of words or develop comprehension uh but similar to the parable of the tortoise and the hair that only matters if you actually keep going and so you got to do something that actually works for you and is sustainable and it's interesting to you and uh will keep you motivated um and moving forward in your process uh in terms of that perfectionist mindset of like mining every single word that you don't know uh
there are some people that definitely have that I think other people that perfectionist mindset would actually sort of destroy their motivation you know they'd be learning lots of words that are not relevant um you know I'm reading these sci-fi and fantasy novels right now and if I were mining these words like yes I could probably learn them but these are words that I would never ever hear in casual conversation I would never really use in my own life so is it really worth me spending the time to study those um I think a lot of
people also really struggle at the beginning of the process where they think oh I have to learn every single word um but like Clayton on our team says it's like you're not collecting rare Pokemon um the words that are important to learn will show up again you don't need to learn every single word the first time you see it if you try to do that approach you're going to end up drowning in Anki depth um just because there are so many words to learn um so in terms of you know learning most efficiently meaning spending
your a limited amount of Anki time on the words that are most important um the words that are most important are the ones that are going to appear over and over again so if you are mining every single word you don't know you don't actually know which ones are appearing over and over again or not um that being said some people like the perfectionist mindset they just really want to have every single thing and it doesn't bother them if they end up doing like two hours of Anki a day or if they're mining like a
hundred new sentences and cards a day um I personally would find that absolutely soul-crushing so I would not do that that would not be an effective study strategy for me but you generally want to identify sentences that have enough context that you can understand um the sentence without the uh senses on either side of it um though in some of the mining that I've done I've actually mined like entire paragraphs of text rather than just the one sentence um and you generally only want to have one unknown word in the sentence or one unknown grammar
point in the sentence so that you can uh just understand it uh when you look at the sentence and you don't really have to think about the other stuff that might be happening you know that's a not a strict rule you can of course mine sentences with more unknowns but it's harder to learn there's more information that your brain has to deal with [Music] um so it's not so much like there is one effective process as much as there are a lot of different factors and levers and buttons that you can push and pull to
um improve your retention or improve your uh Association and contextual awareness of the word um contextual attachment to the word um to improve your recall or make your recall even harder to like force your brain to work harder for it so there's a lot of different ways to think about it um you should find the uh you should play with a bunch of different methodologies and find the one that feels good for you uh the one that felt good for me was I did a multi-pass mining approach where uh it was completely asynchronous I would
just Mark every sentence where there is one or more unknown things that I uh are in in the sentence and I would go through a TV Show and Mark every single sentence in that and then I would export the list of all the unknown sentences to a spreadsheet and I would not touch it for a week and I come back a week later and read through the sentences to decide which sentences were actually good candidates for sentence mining um and then I would review them for a period of time and then I would re-listen to
the same content uh once I had a chance to learn the relevant words and so for me I found that a really effective process because I was getting multiple exposures to the same word and within the same context um that being said that is an optimization you don't strictly have to do that common words will appear in many different contexts you know when we talk about learning a lot of words we're talking about you know uh 5000 is sort of where we put the the line to fluency really I would say you should be aiming
more to like ten thousand um but the 5000 words in the beginning stages are relatively common and you should be encountering them relatively frequently especially in the early parts of that like one thousand two thousand three thousand yeah um you should be seeing those words in a lot of different places across different domains um but yes narrowing your focus to a single domain it will be easier to master all of the words and that don't mean versus trying to split your attention between two different domains hey as you know there's a lot of language learning
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