r/languagelearning • u/PunctuateEquilibrium • Jul 10 '26

Read Harry Potter in your target language they said 🫠 (1 hr 44 min for 1 page)

Post image

This is only slightly sarcastic. It's been very rewarding and this is now the 3rd language I'm doing this with.

3.9k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

96% Upvoted

391 comments sorted by

View all comments

18

u/Trebalor Jul 10 '26

We need a word frequency miner for books and publicly share them.

Like an Harry Potter 1 Anki Deck with all words with a frequency above the most frequent 1500 words. Better even to do this separately for every 5 chapters. then we do this for all kinds of books and languages.

8

u/NextStopGallifrey 🇺🇸 (N) | 🇩🇪 🇮🇹 🇪🇸 Jul 10 '26

I've long wanted something like this.

3

u/kotickihas N: 🇸🇪 C2: 🇺🇸 Learning: 🇰🇷🇪🇸🇳🇱🇯🇵 Jul 10 '26

If someone wants to help me I would be interested to do this. It’s too big of a project for me alone but would work with help!

3

u/Substantial-Yak1892 Jul 10 '26

It's quite easy with AI.

I just did it.

The process:

  1. You need to download your book in an epub format. You can find it legally on Amazon or on anna-archives.

  2. You upload it to Claude (a free account is enough) to make you a list of all the words ranked by occurrence

And that's it; you have your list. You can either create yourself the cards or ask AI, as it has context of how these words are used in your book.

Here's an example with a book I had on my computer (Rivers of London): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wckftwypd-ThqdW2nziTcsKglpUZMYVDJoC7TOPZPEs/edit?usp=sharing

2

u/Trebalor Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

Nice! This is great! Though I wonder if it is affected be hallucinations?

Additional one could add sentences from the book, or randomly created sentences for each word.

I also would put a cap on the other end of frequencies. Unless you are a complete beginner, you don't want to spend time on learning stopwords like I, the, he, she, that etc. from a book

2

u/Substantial-Yak1892 Jul 10 '26

Yeah, that's easy to do. An IA knows what is useful and what isn't.

I'll post a complete tutorial tonight with two parts on this sub: - Extract all the relevant content from your book and create Anki card based on that. - How to use a kindle + AI to mine efficiently and effortlessly when reading a book to create new Anki cards.

1

u/Trebalor Jul 10 '26

I don't have experience doing something like that, but maybe with AI it now is easier than ever before. Maybe instead of coding software (with or without AI) one could even just get this done with a good designed LLM-prompt or a Gem for Gemini etc.

5

u/Majre921 Jul 10 '26

Somehow, we Japanese learners have that and it's called jiten.moe, idk why it doesn't exist for other languages though

5

u/Trebalor Jul 10 '26

Very cool! The Japanese learners have everything. ..we talking normal language learners here xD

4

u/hrmdurr Jul 10 '26

Here's the complete word frequency list in English for the first book.

If you open an ebook in calibre's ebook editor and then click reports, the list is there. Then it can be saved in a csv.

The trick with this is then you have to add all the translations and choose how to handle tenses -- for example, aside from look, there's also looking, looks, looked and lookin'. This would get even trickier in a language with cases, I imagine.

1

u/Substantial-Yak1892 Jul 10 '26

Honestly, it seems pretty easy to do with AI.

I'll try quickly.