Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0413: Frequency vocabulary in media such as films, books, and articles

Episode Date: October 7, 2015

Eduardo wants to learn more about the idea of finding frequent vocabulary in specific documents rather than an entire language. I talk about the methods used to make this powerful learning strategy work. In addition, Co-op media tour develop the cooperative message with non-competitive products that complement your messaging. Learn more at kefmedia.com What do […]

Master of Memory 413. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Eduardo submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Eduardo says, Hi Timothy, I've listened to all your episodes, and I got intrigued by the method you described of finding the most frequent terms in a document. But I didn't understand the process. Can you explain it step by step?

I think it would help me very much and potentially many other listeners of the podcast. Thank you very much, and keep up the good work. Well, first of all, Eduardo, wow, and thank you for listening to every episode of the podcast. I'm sure that you've gotten a lot of ideas for how to learn certain things, and I'm glad that you're acting on some of them. I would suggest that you really put more of this stuff into action because the people that I like to hear from are the people that are taking the most action and not just listening and letting the information go in one ear and out the other, but for each thing that you find interesting, actually sitting down and making it happen. Now, with that in mind, let's do that with this episode. So first of all, what you're wanting to do is to find the most frequent terms in a document so that these things that you're going to keep coming across are second nature to you when you read the document

and they don't hold you back from understanding it. You know, when you're reading something, whether it's in your native language or in a language that is a secondary language or a language you're continuing to learn, it can be very frustrating when you have to keep stopping and looking up words, especially when those words are words that keep coming up and you have to re-look them up each time. So it's very nice to be able to have some sort of proactive system where you learn all those most frequent words first, and then when you read the document, you don't have to look them up. Now, in answer to your question, here's the method that I've used in the past. You'll take, let's just imagine for the sake of what we're doing here, that it's an article

online. You can copy all of the text into a text document of some kind. I personally like TextEdit because it's simple and works perfectly, but if you enjoy the physical feeling of your hair turning gray, I suppose you can use Microsoft Word. At any rate, any text software where you can do a search and replace. So you copy all that text into there, and then you'll do a search and replace of all the punctuation. And basically, you'll just search for punctuation and replace it with nothing. So you're getting rid of all the punctuation in the document. We're focused on words here. Then you replace all of the spaces with carriage returns. And so now you just have pure words with a word on each line. Copy and paste the result into

a spreadsheet, and then run a formula in that spreadsheet that counts the repeats of all the words. Then you sort the spreadsheet by frequency. So suddenly you have all the words. Then you sort this spreadsheet by frequency. So suddenly you have all the words in the document sorted by frequency. The next task, of course, is to filter out all the words that you already know, which is extremely tedious, but there you have it. That's the process that I used to follow for finding all of the terms in a document, finding the most frequent, and then focusing on the ones that I don't know yet and learning those. But fortunately, I now have a tool that I can use where I basically just have to copy the whole text straight into a tool online at a web page, and then also copy in all the vocabulary that I know,

or all the vocabulary that's very common, whether in Spanish, copying in all the words that are in the accelerated Spanish course, or in English, copying in all of the 1,000 most frequently used English words. Then the tool, the online tool, in a few seconds just spits out all of the vocabulary from most frequent to least frequent very conveniently. And if it's Spanish, I can actually just hit a Google Translate button and then I have the translations of all those words. Unfortunately, this tool takes up a lot of processing power on the Master of Memory website, and so I can't actually make it public yet, although I invite anyone who wants to do

it for Spanish or even for an English project to get in contact with me. Just send me an email at timothyatmasterofmemory.com, and I'd be happy to use this tool for you. I just can't make it public because it could, at the time of this episode, it could crash my website, and so I don't want to risk that happening. So Eduardo, I definitely invite you to get in touch with me, and I can help you work through any projects that you're working on. Also, for anyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours.

Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon. Thank you.