@bamboozled I just do it the lazy way. I don’t do any SRS, any re-watching, nor subtitle by subtitle (‘q’ activated), nor anything else fancy. I just watch videos with dual subtitles on, reading the Russian subtitles and when I don’t know a word, I glance down at the English subtitle, scanning it, looking for the definition of the unknown word. If you have only one or two unknown words in a subtitle line, you can usually easily find the meaning of the unknown word. If there are several unknown words in a single subtitle line, I probably won’t be able to quickly figure out the definitions of them all before the subtitle changes, so I would need to press the hotkeys to go back a subtitle (‘a’) or repeat it (‘s’) or I may need to hover over the individual words to find their individual meanings. As a general rule though, the sentence translations suffices in 90% of my cases, meaning I can find the definition of the word without even touching the mouse. This is ideal and faster.
The most important part in how I’m using it though is in content selection:
- I want content, which has accurate subtitles, obviously, but that’s a given
- I want content, which only has one or two unknown words per subtitle line. This is very important. If you have many unknown words per subtitle line, it involves lots of repeating of each subtitle line and using the pop-up dictionary (or, hell, even activating ‘q’). This really slows it down and clearly distracts your attention away from reading the subtitles while watching the video in the background.
- I like to keep with the same publisher / YouTube channel for a while, so you get lots of repetition of vocabulary and you get used to their voice/s. Keeping with the same YouTube channel, which discusses the same topic with the same presenter/s, is how I can get away with not having the repeat the same content. Novel content makes it much more engaging and hence better for memory (plus it’s a way to ‘naturally’ filter out rare words).
So, as you can see, the biggest challenge is really content selection.
I am very happy with my experience with Language Reactor. It involves much much less clicks that using LingQ, where you have to click every word to get a pop-up of a list of definitions, then another click to select the best definition, or else the word gets marked as Known. It’s really hard to do this on the fly without pausing, unless there are a very low number of New Words. @PeterBormann goes through the list of New Words before studying a lesson, lingQing them, as far as I’m aware. You don’t have to do that with Language Reactor. I don’t do any clicks with Language Reactor (it’s a hover-over pop-up dictionary). Hell, I barely use the mouse at all. I can really cover much more content this way. Honestly, I’m kinda surprised how fast I’ve moved onto native content (obviously I’m watching easier native content, but it’s still native content).