Does anyone use user synonyms for translations?

I‘m curious about whether anyone here uses the user synonyms feature to translate English to their native language (mine is German)? I was thinking about doing it, but I‘m not so sure if it would actually help - aside from being a lot of work. Any thoughts? :thinking:

1 Like

It’s totally fine to do it. Remember that the English meanings are always translations and languages have their own nuances. If you’re doing JP => EN, I don’t see a problem doing JP => DE :grin:

I’ve used it once for the word 歩幅 (it was outside of WK) because the Portuguese word for it makes a lot more sense.

I see it being worth it for words you feel more comfortable in your native language :slight_smile: No need to translate every single word. As you go on doing lessons, you can see if you should add native synonyms or not ^^

4 Likes

I started doing this for some words where I knew the answer but could not remember which specific English word they were looking for. Or in cases where my brain was insisting on giving super weird answers: for example I do of course know the word “dinner”. But when I see 晩ご飯, my brain will always come up with “evening meal” (Abendessen) instead .

But after a while, that became annoying to do and I’m using the Anki mode script now and just press a button to say whether I knew the answer or not. I’m here to learn a language, not beat a game. So I have no problem with rating my own answers as true or false. I even feel like I can focus more properly on the item and the mnemonics since I’m not wasting time and mental energy on typos and figuring out which English word I should enter.

2 Likes

Thanks for your thoughts, @jprspereira, @irrelephant!

That‘s it! I had some occasions where, while I knew the meaning of the kanji/vocabulary, I found myself thinking way too long about which specific English word WK was expecting me to enter to mark the answer as correct. Guess I will use for these cases then! :smile:

1 Like

Native English speaker, but I think the only thing to make sure of is to take the translated words from a reliable source in your native language. Relying on translations from the English to German, or with Google Translate or something, would probably cause issues here and there.

1 Like

I do it for some words where it takes me ages to recall the English word (Regal instead of shelf, I don’t know why my brain takes so long for that), or where the German word is simply shorter (Stau instead of traffic jam).
When review time comes I’m sometimes a bit hesitant whether I put a German synonym or not, but that’s also what I have the Ignore Script for.

I definitely wouldn’t do it for every word because it’s so much work, but for some special cases it’s really helpful.

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.