On French and Spreadsheets

Memory Training Journals
1

Since we’re all talking about those two subjects, I thought I would outline my approach to learning to read French.

  1. Obtain the french book in text format in a file.
  2. Obtain the English version of the book.
  3. Copy text from French file.
  4. Go to textalyser.net and paste in the french text.
  5. Sort for most repeated words in the text. Highlight and copy those words.
  6. Paste those words into a Google spreadsheet column. Next to it put the translate function. *
  7. Save the two columns into a tab delimited text file.
  8. Upload that file to flashcardexchange to create a set of flashcards.
  9. Study the flashcard before reading the passage so that you have at least a rough idea of the vocabulary.
    10 Read the novel and improve the flashcard meanings as you find better meanings for your words.
  10. After getting your best read then refer to the English (in my case) version of the novel and learn what you can from that.
  11. Repeat.

Notes:
This is just a quick and dirty outline.
It’s probably not the best way to do it, but it is interesting.
I like reading novels because it builds a great context for understanding the words.
If anyone is interested I’ll go more into detail

*GoogleTranslate GoogleTranslate(text, source language,target language)
Translates text in the specified range from the source language into the target language.
Entering “auto” instead of the source language and target language parameters automatically identifies the language of the source text and translates into a language based on your locale settings.
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2

Hey Dale, I really like this idea. It would be great to do this with phrases and idioms as well, as I’ve come to discover that they’re an extremely important part of reading French. Do you know whether that would be technologically feasible with your method?

3

Hi Dayman, You’re sure right about the idioms.The textalysor can give you the most common 2,3 or 4 word prhases in the text which often indicates an idiom. The thing about reading classic literature is that you often see the “birthplace” of certain idioms. I used to think that there was a one to one correlation between words in one language and those of another, but finally I realized that this word in French sorta kinda almost means this word in English. :slight_smile:

4

That’s brilliant. I just tried it with the lyrics to Meditação (Portuguese).

I had to paste the textalyser.net results into OpenOffice Calc, then the word column from Open Office into Google Docs. The result is here:
Portuguese Vocabulary from Meditação - Google Sheets

I just downloaded a CSV file from that spreadsheet and imported it into Anki. Works great, and didn’t take long…