POLYGLOT Mindhack - WORD mining tools #1

Everyone knows the scenario – you’re watching a movie, series, or video that doesn’t have subtitles in the language you’re learning. Without subtitles, you can't use one of the crucial tools for acquiring new words: your eyes. You can hear what people in the video are saying, but you don't understand because you're still learning the new language. 

You might consider asking someone who speaks the language better than you do. But do you want to wait to get in touch with them, explain the situation, and finally have them clarify what was said in the video? This approach also has its downsides because short-term memory is limited – typically, you can hold 7±2 items (words) in your head for a few seconds, at most minutes. If you don’t review or remember something in context, you simply forget it. 

This phenomenon is called the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, which in short, states that the average person forgets most of what they learned during the day within 24 hours.

To avoid this unfortunate rat race, I recommend focusing on efficiently building your vocabulary as soon as you encounter a foreign word. When it comes to videos, the first thing you should do is pause the video. Then rewind the segment containing the unfamiliar words and start screen recording on your PC (Alt + G on Windows). This will launch a recording studio that will record your screen. After recording, the video is automatically saved to your computer.

The next step is to use software that can automatically subtitle the audiovisual recording. For this purpose, freeware such as CapCut is ideal. Insert the video into it, go to the Text tab, and select the autocaption function. All you need to do is choose the language in which the subtitles should be generated, and you’re done.

I highly recommend having the automatically generated text checked, either by a second person knowledgeable in the desired language or using artificial intelligence.

If you want to extract and use the adjusted subtitles from the video for further study purposes – for instance, to create your own study set on platforms like Anki or Quizlet, you can use an app like TunesKit subtitle extractor.

However, in most cases, subtitled videos like this aren’t long, usually just a few minutes. Therefore, to maximize language exposure, I would also recommend manually writing down new words (on average, you need to review something 7-9 times to remember it in long-term memory).