Oxygen was such a clunky application back when I used it for DH. But very powerful and the best tool in the game. Would love to see a modern tool that doesn't get in the way for all those poorly paid, overworked DH research assistants caffeinated in the dead of night banging out the tedious, often very manual, TEI-XML encoding work...

Hey there, quick suggestion as a PhD Linguistics candidate and avid language learner!

The best way I've found to identify vocabulary most important to my life is through journaling in the language I'm trying to learn. Describing exactly what I did that day, my thoughts, etc, as best I can.

I had thought of doing the journal entries digitally and gathering dictionary headwords from such journal entries, whether they're written in my mother tongue (English) or not, and use the built dictionary lists to drill vocab.

Traditionally you'd use a lemmatizer with a morphosyntactic tagger for the language to identify the dictionary words, but AI is serviceable these days to easily identify dictionary words from long-form text in many languages, though honestly would be surprised if AI outperforms the traditional methods already.

Good luck and have fun :)

Thoughts on FSI methodology? That's what I used for mine (my app).

Honestly had never even heard of it! But adult language acquisition isn't really a domain of study I've ever been interested in. I can only speak to what I have found most helpful in my own adult language acquisition journeys. The journaling method was taught to me by a polyglot friend of mine and it sort of solved the "what actually is my everyday vocabulary anyway" side of language learning for me.

tl;dr "The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the primary training institution to prepare American diplomats to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests, teaching, among other things, the languages of the countries where Foreign Service Officers will serve. "

Apologies, I should have linked beforehand.

Well, clearly there's someone who can provide a check box at least!

Great article, in my Master's and PhD despite being in a stodgy philological field I always opted for this for clarity and conciseness. It can be hard for people to let go because they want to sound clever.

But oh, dear writer, slightly irksome that you learned copyediting but do not use en-dashes for your date ranges!

Saying stuff like "the seventeen hundreds" works in English, but it doesn't necessarily work in other languages. In Dutch that would be "de jaren zeventienhonderd", which sounds like crap compared to "de achtiende eeuw".

> because they want to sound clever

Citation needed. I've never considered "nth century" to be a product of trying to sound clever.