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Can Morphman help me with the monolingual transition?

December 03, 2022 — Tatsumoto

It's unlikely.

Back in the day I saw a bizarre method of going monolingual by making a sentence bank of J-J definitions ripped from a monolingual dictionary, sorting the sentence cards with Morphman and learning them until you can understand J-J definitions well. Though such an approach will work, it's too complicated and extremely tedious. The method said that you have to learn 2000 sentence cards this way. Considering how unnatural sentences in monolingual definitions can be, it's a torture.

Another way is to have a normal sentence bank made from anime, movies and TV shows, like most people do, but put defining vocabulary in the Morphman's priority.db file. Morphman then will prioritize sentences that contain defining vocabulary. This is not a bad idea in theory, but I don't really think that this would help much because defining vocabulary is rarely used outside of dictionaries. It is almost never used in movies, in anime, etc.

Using monolingual dictionaries is a separate skill that you have to train by reading lots of monolingual definitions. Read them for a while, and you'll figure it out.

Tags: faq