Giant paper dictionaries are a thing of the past. Popup dictionaries make word lookups easier: just select a word, press a key, and see its definition (and more).⏎⏎Using a popup dictionary lets you watch and understand content unavailable to learners a few decades ago. You're learning in the future!
Parent Skills:
Giant paper dictionaries are a thing of the past. Popup dictionaries make word lookups easier: just select a word, press a key, and see its definition (and more).⏎⏎Using a popup dictionary lets you watch and understand content unavailable to learners a few decades ago. You're learning in the future!
Expand your abilities in the language
Train your ear to parse the language
Quickly verify and learn new things
Solidify knowledge learned from priming
Watching and reading means that you're watching some kind of video content (an internet video, TV show, movie) and reading along with matching subtitles. You can find matching subtitled content in lots of different places, but TV shows are the most common.
This kind of immersion is foundational to the early stages of the Refold method. You're able to make quick progress thanks to the text, while adapting your ears to the language. In the early stages of learning, this category should make up a bulk of your learning time, balanced with some priming and simple freeflow.
Interactive immersion in general can be intense and difficult. It might feel like your brain is melting. This is normal! But you should be prepared for it. Don't plan to do interactive immersion when you're exhausted after a long day. Find when you have the most learning energy and do it then.
Once you have your video, selectable subtitles and popup dictionary, all you need to do is watch! Whenever you see an interesting word or can't understand a sentence, pause the video and look up a few words. If the sentence has more than 3–4 words you don't know, feel free to move on. The goal isn't to understand every sentence. You want to focus on the low hanging fruit.
The lower your level in the language, the more you'll pause. That's okay. It might take you 5× the length of the content to actually get through it. But you're learning, that's the point.
If you're using a program to make the subtitles selectable, many of them have "auto-pause" features, which automatically pauses after each subtitle line, giving you time to look up words. We recommend you use this since it forces you to focus more on understanding, rather than just zoning out and watching the pretty colors go by.
It's also a good idea to rewatch a scene or a few lines after you successfully understand, since that gives your brain a good chance to really understand it, in real time.
To do this technique, you'll need a few things:
1. Video content that has matching subtitles2. Selectable subtitles (read below)
3. A popup dictionary that supports your language
Item 2, Selectable subtitles, means that you need to be able to interact with the subtitles. Many websites don't have their subtitles rendered as text, which means you can't copy them. To test if this is the case for you, open the video you want to watch and turn on subtitles. Can you select the text and copy it? Or does it not act like regular text on a webpage? If you can copy it, great! But if you can't, you'll need to use something that allows you to do that, or else you won't be able to use the popup dictionary. The best tool for this is ASBplayer.
The core "loop" of watching and reading with a popup dictionary is this: