Learning vocab ahead of reading? (software for epub analysis) (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works to c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I just jail broke my kindle and have a few epubs and thought maybe this would be a good time to change my approach to vocabulary.

What I'd like to do is learn the vocabulary for my reading before I read it, instead of after, or as I'm reading it.

My dream piece of software would do the following:

resolve all words down to their most basic form (ie, singular for nouns, infinitive for verbs, etc.) (My Language is French)
count occurences of each word
Filter out words I already know
Define the words with a bilingual dictionary to english, including original context sentence.
Make anki cards for me to study.

(6) God-tier programming: also include idiomatic expressions as vocabulary)

Does this exist?

Edit: Or help me assemble a pipe to get all these tasks done separately.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I feel like you're approaching this incorrectly. Do you have graded readers?

An A2 graded reader would assume you knew all A2 level words and have definitions for the B1+ / B2 (or beyond) words in the text.

So instead of making software that does the work of making a graded reader, it is probably better to just start by using graded readers (where all this work has already been done).

[-] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

I feel like it's not that much work and the benefit is that it gives me a lot more freedom to read what appeals to me.

FOr instance, I found an unseeded torrent of 600 French epubs. Imagine being able to do something as simple as sorting them by lexical complexity--that is do a unique word count and rank from lowest unique word count to most unique word count. Trivially simple to do and would yield me books that are constantly in my range of proximal learning.

But, yes, thank you for the suggestion! I'll look into some readers, depending if I feel more lazy than broke.