How to learn vocabulary in ANY language with sentence mining!

at 10:32 you wrote egész-evening, "egész" means "the whole" -> referring to the whole event that has happened (evening is "este") but in context it could be right

I have been doing this for years! It is so important to include the context when studying vocabulary. Never try studying words in isolation. It is much harder to remember the words. Also, it may be important to know HOW words are used in certain contexts. E.g. In some languages, register is very important (looking at you, Japanese!) You don't want to use an informal word or expression in a formal setting.

Too advanced for me

So it's not a good idea to sentence mine as a complete beginner (less than 500 words)

Or you can sentence mine yourself!

I'm a mom and say the same things every day: Where are your shoes? Go put that away in your room. Are you ready? Go stand by the door.

I've started focusing on learning in Spanish so I'm actively saying them every day in my real life. My kids love figuring out what I mean (my 5 year old is in a dual immersion school, so she's also learning Spanish), and my 2 year old is picking everything up super fast.

Context is great, but context we use is even better. I think back to what really stuck and it's when I worked in a kitchen with a bunch of Hispanic people and we talked about food every day.

You could even put an earbud in and press record and see what I you say over the course of an hour or so, translate it, and then learn those words and sentences.

It's jackets and backpacks and toys for me! Hope this helps someone :)

i love your energy so much! thank you for sharing your light ❤

Me, who has taken exactly this approach for years with Chinese and other languages simply because it seemed like the most logical thing to do....*nods*
but really, it IS the single most natural way to actually learn, because you cannot just learn vocabulary words in vacuum. They're not USEFUL by themselves. You'll end up doing what I did early in my CHinese journey and that was you'll hear a sentence, you'll spot a word here and there that you know, but the WHOLE of the sentence is lost to you, so you feel like you're forever picking up fragments. MORE importantly, it gets you started putting together grammatical patterns that repeat over and over and over again, and EVENTUALLY you will notice that, or paired phrases, set phrases, different word orders (in some languages, like Estonian, the place in the sentence the word can actually come in can CHANGE kind of arbitrarily at times and no app will teach you that), etc. When you learned your mother tongue, did you EVER have to study grammar to ACTUALLY learn it, or were you pretty much already quite fluent and able to babble on for a good long time LONG before you had your first grammar lesson in school? EXACTLY. You already had a good understanding of the grammar, you just didn't know what the grammar TERMS were called e.g. noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb. Honestly even with English I STILL as an adult don't REALLY remember all that grammar babble - but I'm fully capable of stringing together a sentence that is grammatically correct whenever I choose to. I don't always ELECT to do so - colloquial speech often ISN'T 100% technically correct if you want to be a grammar nazi, but I know HOW to.

So HOW did you learn to do that in your mother tongue, is the question. You didn't learn it in school. Nobody sat you down and said "you have to say 'I want to go to the store' and not 'I store go want to the'" - you gathered that ENTIRELY organically by simply HEARING people talk, PARROTING your parents and anyone else around you, and you went from there. You started VERY simple: mama, dada, papa, baba, whatever the word for your parents are as a baby in your native language, mama was PROBABLY your first word. THEN you learned things MOST immediately important to you. Cookie/biscuit. Doggy. Kitty. I want that. What that? (no, what IS that, your mother might correct you). Red, blue, yellow, green. One, two, three, four. Triangle, square, circle. Cloud, horse, cow, things that appear in children's books you regularly see and hear. Those all enter your long-term memory first.

THEN by age three or so, you're able to start communicating a bit more complexly. "I want to go play outside". "When will mama come home?", etc.
By age 4 to 5, you might be learning to read your earliest words (some earlier, but most people, around here). Simple things. The Hungry Caterpillar, See Spot Run, Run, Jane, Run. Things like that. Lots of REPEATING so you're sure to remember the spelling. And VERBALLY, by age 5 you've likely got a working vocabulary of at least 5,000 words. 10,000 words by age 10. 20,000 words by the time you leave high school. Depends on the language of course but general rule of thumb.

So THAT's how you learned. Repeated exposure to ACTUAL speech, ACTUAL sentences, not words in a vacuum. It was almost ALWAYS in context. Even if a picture book was super simple, it would have a picture of a balloon, and it'd say balloon. Then it'd have a RED balloon, and you'd learn to associate RED with the WORD 'red'. A blue one. A green one, and so on. You didn't JUST learn "little", you learned "little _____". Little MOUSE. Little BOY. Little GIRL. BIG elephant. TALL giraffe. TALL tree. SHORT dwarf. YOu were never just handed a vocabulary list and said "remember these, and good luck making a sentence out of them. You ALWAYS had context.

So it's vital to take the same approach when learning a lesson. Of course, the REALITY is that as adults we have LIVES. We have things to DO. We cannot usually be immersed in the language 24/7 and learn as slowly as we did as a child and we don't HAVE to because as an adult we already have a fully functional language to use as a tool to understand the new one. With it, we can develop thoughts and have things EXPLAINED. It's important to rely on your native language as little as humanly possible, but it's useful for a 90%/10% split where 10% of the time for maybe an intermediate level you can go to English. That speeds things up enormously vs having to be exposed to the thing a over the course of years to get the same effect. Recently I played a Super Nintendo game that I couldnt beat in YEARS as a kid. I beat it in a DAY, because I'm now capable of thinking on a higher level than i was back then and working out where to go and what to do.

And of course in reality, you DO at least need a starting SET of vocabulary words or you won't be doing any sentence mining at all since your comprehension will be 0%. EVERY word would be new. Zero context.
You don't want to sit around waiting for yourself to learn some words by osmosis like you did as a kid, so you need to have a more structured approach.

That's why I USUALLY start with the same exact base words we do as children. Family members, numbers and colors, shapes, animals, foods, locations, etc. THEN I start stringing together really simple little sentences, and usually this comes from going through some course or other - be it a language app or whatever. Get yourself to at LEAST I'd say 1,000 to 2,000 words, probably 2,000, and learn some simple phrases to put the words in as you go, THEN you can start consuming simple content. OR, alternatively, finish the course FIRST, reviewing daily (spaced repetition, here's where Anki IS useful even if it is clunky and slow to make new cards) - THEN start once you have enough vocabulary to understand the MAJORITY of words in daily speech.

SPeakly for instance sets its courses at I think 4,000 vocabulary words, and of course there are many listening exercises, speaking exercises, grammar exercises and so on along the way, lots of example sentences. I did the full 4,000 word course in less than a year, and granted I forgot a lot of things, admittedly (that's a fast pace to burn 4,000 whole words into your mind forever) but I AM still years later a LOT more capable of understanding a lot of (slower, clearly spoken, daily speech) dialogue than the EXTREMELY low level I was at when I started. I still struggled to TALK, because comprehending listening and reading is totally different from thinking of your own sentences on the fly and having ACTUALLY spoken to people, but at very least, it was a big boost toward a level where I could comprehend a lot of things IF they had been covered in that course and IF they weren't spoken as crazy fast as people often speak in real life.

But that's why it's a STARTING point. People view finishing something like that as the end goal, no, it's the STARTER KIT. It gives you a lot of vocabulary you need for the future, from THERE, you need to set out on your own and figure out all the grammar and how to string together new sentences on your own comfortably, TALK a lot, LISTEN a lot, READ a lot, and mine sentences AS you watch videos or read.

When I make a new card on Anki, I ALWAYS have at LEAST one sentence with the word in it. It's NEVER just "here's the word, here's the definition, remember it" - rather, it's more like this:

FRONT SIDE:

宇

BACK SIDE:

(yu)
space, universe, world
Eaves, house

很久很久以前天和地还没有分开。到处混混沌沌的一片漆黑。宇宙好像和可巨大的鸡蛋。
Hen jiu hen jiu yi qian, tian he di hai mei you fen kai. dao chu hun hun dun dun do yi pian qi hei. yu zhou hao xiang yi ke ju da de ji dan.

A long, long time ago, the earth and sky had not yet separated. There was darkness everywhere. The universe seemed like a huge chicken's egg.

This is a passage from the Chinese story of Pan gu, one I remember writing out the characters to a decade ago and I remember THOSE LINES to this DAY because every haracter in that story I was writing out A HUNDRED TIMES A DAY before moving on to the next one. One character a day back then. Slow going by MAN did it stick. I have not reviewed that story since....2016, 2017? And here we are in 2026, and I still remember it from when I finally got around to actually learning to WRITE in Chinese (I'd avoided it for YEARS before then, sticking only to spoken Chinese).

Notice that yu (the front character) is part of yu zhou (universe) and appears here in CONTEXT of that story taht stuck in my head.

That's how to best make use of something like Anki. The HARD part is, being consistent on REVIEWING the cards.

this video feels very 2019 tutorial core and i love it ty for this queen

I memorize ready-made sentences from movies and put them in the Anki app to help with revision. If I continue and memorize 4000 sentences, will I become a B2?

Are there any similar websites but free? or a little cheaper 😭😭

Now I want to understand what they say as if it were my native language 😞

Can I do that with music?

Thank you very much. This video is very useful for me ❤

I had never heard of sentence mining. I like this concept, though!

Merci pour tes conseils notamment le whisper Tool. Hier j'ai testé via Perplexity d'extraire les transcriptions audio en ainu itak. Je vais tester Whisper.
(et quel plaisir d'entendre parler de User Research dans tes videos )

Thanks👍
And yes, example sentences are everything. Context🖖
Basic vocabulary learning and I’m lost

I cannot express enough how much it helps to hear you struggling with shadowing a long word in Hungarian. I struggle so much with long words in my target languages and knowing that someone I respect so much struggles as well helps me not feel like I'm messing things up.

谢谢林迪姐姐。我想更深入地研究句子挖掘这个主题。

希望你能尽快流利地掌握你最喜欢的匈牙利语。

After learning,

Wow, Y2 DO WHat a tool!! Thanks

good video

Thanks for the video. Hope part 2 comes soon

this is so stupid. just make sentences from YOUR BRAIN.

1:11 What app is she using to watch the subtitles?

I’ve never seen it explained this way.

Hello! Currently at a beginner level in Spanish and Tagalog. What are some of your favorite language exchange apps!?

I’m on a budget so trying to utilize every resource I can. Love your videos and language learning techniques!

Thank you! I am learning 日本語. I dislike learning vocabulary in one by one, traditional way. I learn vocabulary better with rhymes, songs, videos. I memorized counters by listening counters songs. Your idea of sentence mining is good for me.

i did not raise my hand