The core part of the Refold Method is using media and entertainment made for native speakers to learn a language. And it's really effective. Hundreds of people have reached very high levels while having a really good time.
It's effective not only for the people that want to have a general ability in the language, but also for the people whose sole purpose is to immerse in content in that language. That all sounds amazing on paper, but, in practice, finding the right content can be pretty hard. Either your language doesn't actually have that much content and it's kind of hard to find, or there's so much content that it's almost impossible to sift through everything and find something you're actually interested in.
And plus, if you're still a beginner, you don't really know the language and know how to search and find things, and so your recommendations are pretty slim. And that's where the Refold Crowdsource Docs come in. These Google Docs were supposed to solve that problem.
We made them a few years ago and allowed anybody to submit resources for a language they were learning, to allow future learners to skip the boring parts of looking for decent content. But Google Docs just wasn't made for this purpose. They're kind of clunky, hard to navigate, and the content is not sorted in a very useful way.
A lot of people check out these docs exactly one time. The day they join, they look at some things, maybe click on some links, and then never open the document ever again. And so, we've totally revamped them.
These new spreadsheets we've made are way more intuitive and make it a lot easier to find content, no matter where you are in your journey. And so, with this video, I'm proud to announce the beginning of a brand-new era of amazing, beautiful resource docs. One of the main differences and decisions that we made is to have a dedicated curator for each doc.
This is a learner that's a part of the community who's actively learning that language and collecting resources, curating them, and making sure that the sheet stays up to date and is useful. This means that the doc's going to be a lot more alive, have more interesting and relevant resources, and have somebody that's focused on keeping it a nice thing to use. This does mean that not all languages are going to have a doc, but we'll talk about that in a second, because I really want to show you these first.
Here's the doc for Czech that I've been personally curating for the past couple weeks or months. If you want to follow along yourself, go to refold. link/czech.
All of the sheets are going to generally look like this. There will be some differences between some of the languages, especially the bigger ones, but they follow the same structure. You start on a Homepage with some basic information and links to the other tabs.
Then there's a Beginner Materials tab where you can find some stuff if you're a brand-new beginner to the language, and then all of the other ones which are sorted by what kind of content they're showing. If I'm looking for some new YouTubers to watch, I'll go to the YouTube Channels tab. But if I want to watch a show or a movie, I can go to that tab, or an audiobook here.
And this even works on mobile, but I will say it's a lot easier at the Sheets app, because the web version is a little bit janky. But my absolute favorite part is the new submission process. The old "process" was that you'd go into the doc and you would comment a suggestion that would then be reviewed and approved sometime later in the month.
This meant that submissions would take a while to come in, some of them were accidental, and often they would be formatted differently than was required, so they would just kind of look out of place and not fit. But the new system uses a Google Form, which will format everything for you. You just have to fill in the couple of boxes and boom, you're done.
It takes me less than a minute to submit a resource. All you gotta do is go to refold. link/languagename-submit and you'll be shown the form.
Or you can find the link in the server or on the home page of the database itself. Fill out the form, hit "Submit" and the doc curator is going to see your entry and make it a part of the main database. It's so much more streamlined than the last system.
For me, it's become a part of my immersion routine. Every time I come across a new resource, I just keep it open in a new tab, and then after I'm done, I submit all of those resources to the document. It's that easy.
And now you're probably wondering how you can get access to such amazing, beautiful language docs for your language. You may have even gone to refold. link/your language.
At time of recording, we've only launched docs for a few languages. Now, let's see if I can remember off the top of my head. Spanish, Czech, Tagalog, Polish, Italian, Cantonese, Hawaiian and Quechua.
And then Basque is on the way. That's not really that many languages. We still have dozens of languages on the old Google Doc system, and there are thousands of languages that don't even have a Google Doc, which is where you come in.
If you're a dedicated and passionate learner of a language, you can become a curator for your brand-new resource doc. And it's not even that big of a job. Setting it up initially does take a bit of work, but after that, it's maybe 10 minutes a week, if that.
We've set these up to be pretty simple to manage. At the beginning, you do want to fill it in with some resources, especially for beginners, so it doesn't look totally empty. But then, after we launch it, all you got to do is manage the submissions once a week and add them to the doc, and that's a very streamlined process.
And of course, me and the other curators are all there to help you if you have any questions or need to ask for support. But if you don't want to be a curator, that's totally fine. You're still a critical part of the process.
Please submit resources, please. Curators are people as well and can only come across so many different resources in their immersion time. And those are going to heavily bias towards their interests and learning style.
And so, if you're also learning a language, submit things. We want these docs to be varied and interesting for any learner, not just the curator and people very similar to them. Bookmark the submission form for any language as you're learning and submit things often.
It's a huge help for other learners that come to your awesome language. Or, if you're a native of one of these languages, please submit as well. That would be great.
Make sure you're a part of the Refold Discord Community, refold. link/join, and say hi to the other learners of your language or languages. And see what other docs have popped up since the filming of this video.
It's a great community with a ton of useful things and other learners, and I'm sure you'll love it there. And if you want to be a curator, reach out to "George_Pig" or "Mycheze" on the server, that's me and Clayton, and we'll help you get set up. I'm super pumped about these new language docs, and I've already enjoyed making, and using, the language docs for Czech and Spanish.
And seeing languages like Hawaiian and Quechua with such awesome resources is amazing. I hope that you try them out and submit some resources while you're at it. But before I end this video, can you please just quickly check to make sure you're subscribed?
Oh, you are? Great. You rock.
Anyways, have a great rest of your day and happy immersing.
