I’d like to tell my story as I think it might help to understand how a (great) program like Readlang could be improved for complete beginners. I started learning German two months ago.
I wanted to be able to consume content using comprehensible input techniques, so I took a look at similar apps to readlang but I thought the workflow was too cumbersome for a complete beginner.
I came up with my own crude technique which was extremely effective. The key is automatically expanding/translating all the words.
- I chose good input. Extr@ Auf Deutch episode 1 on Youtube. I got the German transcript.
- I fed the transcript to ChatGPT and asked it to translate to English.
- I fed the transcripts to ChatGPT and prompted it to inject an English [translation] after every German word. Example: Sie [They] wohnen [live] zusammen [together] in [in] Berlin [Berlin].
- I repeatedly read 10 lines of the mixed German-English version. I referenced the English version to understand grammar.
- I eventually switched to the German version, only refering to the German-English version when I forgot a word. I repeatedly watched the video too (the 10 lines with German captions).
- I tested myself by watching the video without captions (10 lines) and stoped to mark any words I didn’t understand.
- Then I moved to the next 10 lines, and repeated steps 4,5,6 until I got to the end of the show.
- I asked ChatGPT to generate a CSV file from the German transcript that I could import into Anki. I had to prompt it carefully to avoid duplicates.
- I moved on to the next episode, and repeated steps 1-8.
I learned hundreds of words in a short timespan, and was able to watch the videos with 99% comprehension. I don’t think I could have progressed so quickly with readlang or similar.
Perhaps readlang could have a “translate all” button? I’m not sure if that is good UX.
Of course, another solution to this is to start with extremely easy content, but it would not have been as fast.