In the latest update, I write about the importance of checking the pronunciations of English words and offer a few tips about that.

Mark Davies, creator of the largest freely available corpus of English, has built another tool, called WordAndPhrase.info. What does it do? You type in an English word and it shows you the following information:

• the word’s rank in the COCA corpus (for example, perform is the 954^th most frequent word in the corpus)
• the word’s relative frequency in spoken English, fiction, magazines, newspapers and academic texts; for example, sullen (=angry and silent) is used almost exclusively in fiction writing and practically never in spoken English
• collocates, sorted by part of speech and by frequency; for example, perform often occurs together with words such as task, function, well, better, able and poorly
• example sentences containing the word

If you type * into the search box, you can also get a list of the most frequent English words.

You should be looking at a redesigned Antimoon, the project I’ve been working on for the past month or so. If it looks wrong, you may have to reload the page to get the newest styles.

If anything seems wrong after you reload the page, please let me know.

Here’s a rundown of the most important changes:

• More readable, better-looking text
• Navigation bar on every page
• Coordinated color scheme
• (articles and blog pages only) Dictionary lookup feature — double-click any word to look it up in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (includes phonetic transcription, recordings and of course example sentences)
• (articles only) Google Translate link for people who have difficulty reading in English and whose languages are not included in the Translation Wiki.
• (articles and blog pages only) Buttons for sharing an article on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Awesome print stylesheet — if you print an article, it will look almost as good as a page from a book. No ads, no site navigation, just pure text set in a nice font.

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Brandon writes:

I was wondering how many items we should add to SuperMemo per day. What average worked well for you and your friends when you were in high school?

I was a heavy SuperMemo user for about 2.5 years. In that period, I added 6,000 items to my English collection. Therefore, my daily average was about 6 items per day. The typical scenario was that, every few days, I would sit down and add anywhere between 10 and 50 words and phrases to my English collection. In addition to that, I added an average of 4 items per day to my German collection.

Doesn’t sound impressive at all, does it? If there ever was a conference for users of spaced repetition software (SRS), I think 6,000 items would get me laughed out of the room. I personally know people who have memorized more than 20,000 English items. My friend and ex-partner at Antimoon, Michal Ryszard Wojcik, added twice as many items as me.

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Michał B. writes:

I’ve recently started to use Your method (especially SRSing, getting a lot of input and learning to pronounce things) and since then I’ve been observing a big improvement in my comprehension. However, I still have many problems with grammar, so a week ago I decided to give “Pause and Think method” a try. When reading a book I’m trying to analyse grammar structures, collocations, word orders etc. I’m also looking up most words I don’t understand in a dictionary (since I read mostly when using public transportation I use a cell-phone dictionary). The method seems fine, but the problem is, it’s horribly time-consuming. To read a single page using this method I usually need some 15-20 minutes. During this time I could probably read 10 pages. So here’s the question: wouldn’t it be more (or similarly) beneficial to read several books (=to get much more input) instead of reading one, but more carefully?

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