Creating Expressions in Phrasing
There are two ways to create Expressions in Phrasing: you can either Import Expressions or Generate Expressions
Import | If you have specific quotes, sentences, or text in any language, you can Import them into Phrasing. Phrasing will make little-to-no alterations |
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Generate | If you have a specific topic, but no specific text or quotes, you can Generate novel Expressions |
Note: you can have Sterling add additional translations regardless of whether you choose Import or Generate
Importing Expressions
The way I add a majority of my Expressions is by inputting them. I will get my expressions from a variety of sources:
books
movies
tv series
conversations
large language models (ie Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, etc)
Regardless of where my translations come from, I can copy & paste them into Sterling and quickly import them. When I do, I'm faced with three options:
Languages: Here I need to select or add all of the languages I would like the resulting Expressions to contain. We opt for explicitness over trying to infer the languages, so please choose all the languages you would like to see.
Number of Expressions: This is the preferred number of Expressions you would like the text split into. Tap on the currently selected number to clear this number and we will determine the best number ourselves.
Copy Editing: Choose the level of intervention you would like Sterling to have:
Exact
Do not make any changes and import the attached text as-is. Useful when you have pre-formatted and copy-edited text
Touch up
Re-punctuate text, and make sure all capitalization, punctuation, and spacing is correct, without touching words or content. Useful when splitting text or pasting unstructured input. Recommended
Verify
Do a copy-edit pass, fixing any punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. Useful if you're writing sentences yourself
OCR
Actively look for mistakes, and fix any that appear glaringly out of place. Useful if you used camera-to-text functionality (called OCR: Optical Camera Recognition)
How I import Expressions
I recently was reading a book in French that had a series of phrases I was unfamiliar with, so I opened up my iPhone camera, pointed it at the book, and copied the text. From there, I imported it into two Expressions:
I only import Expressions that have several "learning opportunities".
Generating Expressions
Approximately 20% of my Expressions are generated. Generated Expressions work best when you give them the least guidance. For example, generating sentences about dogs will work great; whereas asking it to say "fido almost never drops the ball on command" might result in poor, overly literal translations.
There are three great ways to generate Expressions:
Generating Expressions using words, grammar concepts, or sentence structures you're unfamiliar with
Choose a topic that is interesting to you and letting Sterling choose the sentences
Giving it a _lot_ of information, and asking it to come up with relevant expressions
You have very similar options when generating Expressions:
Languages: Here I need to select or add all of the languages I would like the resulting Expressions to contain. We opt for explicitness over trying to infer the languages, so please choose all the languages you would like to see.
Number of Expressions: This is the preferred number of Expressions you would like Sterling to generate. Tap on the currently selected number to clear this number and we will determine the best number ourselves.
Novelty: This is what percentage of the words should be new. Sometimes, you want to expand your vocabulary. Other times, you'll feel like you just know a bunch of different words, and will want consolidate what you know. You can decide that here, or tap this option to turn it off.
How I generate Expressions
I'll often generate Expressions in two ways. The first way, is to give it a bunch of context, and ask for several expressions in that area:
The other way I'll use it is in response to a card during my reviews. There is a Sterling tab available at the bottom - if I don't really understand why a word is used, or a speciific tense, form, or other grammar pattern; or if the sentence structure just isn't clicking for me, I'll ask for more Expressions along that line. Normally, if you have 3 or 4 Expressions, you'll get used to the pattern/structure/word naturally.
