Words From a Video Come Back With the Moment

You’re watching a video in another language, and a word passes in the subtitles. You guess at it, and the video plays on. A few days later you see it somewhere else. It looks familiar, but the scene is gone.

“How Much Vocabulary One Reading Leaves” looked at reading. This note looks at watching: how much one viewing leaves, and what a word should bring with it when it comes back. Each of the two sections below covers one design.

01Keep the word from the subtitles

In 2018, Peters and Webb asked 63 business students in their first or second year at university in Flanders, Belgium (native language Dutch, English at B1 to B2) to watch a one-hour BBC documentary about the economist Keynes, shown without subtitles. The researchers had chosen 64 target words from the program, each occurring 1 to 6 times. The students were randomly split: 36 watched, and 27 took the same tests without watching, as a control group.⁠[1]

The tests were unannounced. Asked to write the meanings right after the program, the viewers wrote 3.97 more correctly on average, and the control group 1.56 more, a gain that came from having taken the test once. Counted against the words each student didn’t know yet, the viewers learned 8.31% of them and the control group 3.35%. In a second experiment, 62 students took a multiple-choice test, and the viewers recognized almost 14% more words.⁠[1]

Which words were learned depended on how often they occurred: each additional occurrence raised the odds of a correct answer by 25%, and five more occurrences roughly tripled them. The students’ existing vocabulary, and whether a word resembled its Dutch counterpart, also mattered.⁠[1]

The test a week later showed something else: many words were known then that hadn’t been known on the first test. The authors did not count these gains as learning from the program; from a learning point of view, they wrote, the tests had drawn the students’ attention to the new words.⁠[1]

WordLinea’s approachA word in the subtitles is kept with one click, as on a web page: the subtitle line, the lines on either side, the video’s title and its chapter go into your library. The video pauses while you look a word up and plays on when you close the note.

02Bring back the moment

In 1975, Godden and Baddeley had divers learn word lists in two places, on land and underwater, and then recall them in the same place or the other one. Lists learned underwater were recalled best underwater, and lists learned on land were recalled best on land.⁠[2]

Many experiments followed. In 2001, Smith and Vela combined 93 results from 75 studies in 41 articles published between 1935 and 1997: recalling in the setting where something was learned beats recalling in a different one, with an average effect size of d = .28, and the effect is reliable.⁠[3]

Two details bear on reviewing words. One is the interval: tested less than 5 minutes after learning, d = .27; tested a day to a week later, d = .63 (6 results at that interval). The other is that the setting can be brought back without going back: recalling the original setting in the mind gave an effect size of .26, close to the .28 for returning to the original room.⁠[3]

WordLinea’s approachWhen a word comes back, its question shows the video’s title and the moment, such as “▶ 3:12”, and a fill-in question uses that subtitle line. For words kept on YouTube and bilibili, opening the source from your library returns you to that second of the video.

03Two designs, one principle

Watching is like reading: a word passes, and little of it stays. Keep a word from the subtitles as it passes; a few days later it comes back with its line and its moment.

Remember a word from where you met it.