▲ ▼ Teach me vocabulary without spending extra time
I'm trying to improve my vocabulary to sound sophisticated when I speak and write emails. There are several tools which helps me to learn a new word every day, but since it's out of context I usually forget most of them.
I was wondering that it would be nice if I can learn better vocabulary while doing routine tasks like browsing the web, but most of the web articles use dumbed-down vocabulary for the benefit of general audience and so I'm not learning any new words.
Have any of you faced this situation? How can this be solved?
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There are a few chrome extensions already out there. I saw this one on producthunt which looks awesome. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/toucan-3
Thank you emma Toucan - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toucan/lokjgaehpcnlmkebpmjiofccpklbmoci is what I wanted!
Nice! It can be easily solved with a browser extension which replaces common terms on a web page with 'sophisticated'(sic.) vocabulary from the thesaurus. This way, you needn't spend separate time for learning new vocabulary as you do it like browsing regularly.
That's exactly what I had in my mind, how can that be done? What would be the key issues to solve?
Browser extension for replacing words in the web page from thesaurus would be straightforward, but determining which word to select for replacing would be the tricky part.
I remember a site that used to test vocabulary (e.g. word, 4 meanings, you pick which is correct) and the clever thing it did was to continually update the difficulty settings according to how well people actually did. You could do something similar here — e.g. have a "I already know this word" option which bumps up your difficulty a bit.