r/Refold

I'm learning Vietnamese and have for a few months, I've recently been convinced to try taking the immersion learning approach because what I was doing previously wasn't working

Specifically, I have been trying to follow the Refold approach

The problem is that I can't find video content that is at my level, I currently know around 400 words + 400 phrases, which means when I watch a video, even a b1/b2 level comprehensible content (of which there is only 2 channels with few videos), I only know about half of the key words

As far as I can tell, Refold suggests this:

- 70% of time spent should be on active immersion (watching videos and looking up words)

- The focus should be on getting to 1000 words in your Anki deck

But they also say:

- You shouldn't mine a sentence if there are multiple words in that sentence you don't know

- You should save a word with context i.e. the word should be within a sentence

Theres a bit of a catch 22 there because I shouldn't mine unknown sentences, but I also shouldn't save words outside of the context it was actually used

My plan was as follows:

- Break the video into 2 minute sections

- Treat each section as it's own video, then for each section:

- 1st watch session: build meaning of what the speaker is saying by using lookups / subtitles

- 2nd watch session: build vocab - for each pass of the video, take a keyword that I don't know and look it up (this is where the catch 22 is because I'm not meant to save words into my deck without context)

- 3rd, 4th, etc. watch session (after a break from the content): follow the standard Refold approach now that you know the vocab, and then sentence mine?

TLDR:

I don't really understand what I'm meant to be doing with video content as a beginner according to Refold

Is there a specific structure to follow here?

I see everyone talking about the input hours, e.g. "I've reached 1400 hours", I would like to do something similar, but I'm finding it difficult to track because for new content at least half of the time I track is spent doing looks ups, asking chatgpt to explain the meaning of a word with examples, and creating Anki cards

I've looked at the Refold activities, and it's left me more confused/overwhelmed, because there are like, 10 variations for listening with varying degrees of focus

https://preview.redd.it/2fkugs2e5h1h1.jpg?width=785&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9d8d503d9695f70d11d0877fee451be1fff131c5

I have a few questions:

- When you say you have X number of input, does that mean pure watching videos?

- If not, how much of that time was spent with the video paused as you did lookups and created cards?

- What time tracking categories do you have?

Our tool is a chrome extension, for youtube and netflix. It adjusts how subtitles are displayed depending on their difficulty. Currently the subtitles are displayed in a specific way that we defined and we think is good from a learning point of view but we're thinking about allowing users to custom that.

We're considering giving users full control:
a panel where you set your own rules for what happens depending on how difficult a subtitle is for you. Want to blur easy subtitles to train your ear? You could do that. Want to show subtitles in both target and native languages when a subtitle is too hard? Your could do that to. Want unknown words to be translated directly in the subtitles? Thanks to our editor, you'd be able to set that up.

How do we define the difficulty of a subtitle?
You first take a vocabulary test so our tool knows which words you already know. Then when you watch something, for each subtitle, our tool counts how many words you don't know, That's based on this number that you'd be able to define action. Unknown words are displayed in yellow and you can mark them as known as you make progress.

For example, you could set that:
"if there is more than one unknown word, then, display the subtitle in both your target and native language"

There'd also be preset modes for people who just want to pick something and go. Like you could have a chill mode, a focus mode and an intense mode presets.

Community opportunity:

People would be able to create their own custom modes and share them with the reddit community as templates.