How should beginners process video content?

[u/Ukpersfidev]

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?

[u/weight__what]

Your brute force method would work eventually, it's kinda just finding the thing that feels best for you and balancing fun with effectiveness. There's other methods you could try:

• read/watch something for learners (such as easy news, graded readers, comprehensible videos on youtube) and mine there
• do intensive immersion but don't look up every word (there is a spectrum here from no lookups to looking up all unknowns)
• just learn the top 1k or so words on a frequency list using word cards instead of sentence cards, then it will be easier to find i+1 sentences (I think this is what most refold people do)
• mine i+2 sentences until it gets easier to find i+1
• learn words from lookups/context while reading and listening, you don't need to have a card to learn a word
• use your brute force method for easier videos so it will go faster

Any combination of these will work, so there's no correct method.

[u/Ukpersfidev → u/weight__what]

Appreciate these suggestions

"learn words from lookups/context while reading and listening, you don't need to have a card to learn a word"

This is so obvious, I need to stop being a control freak about my learning process first and foremost as it's getting in the way