How to use Reverso Context for Language Learning and Translation
(Not including their AI translation feature)
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Reverso is a website that provides dictionaries, example sentences, and machine translations for a multitude of languages.
The website has an AI translator, which in my opinion isn’t that great with Mandarin (the language I use the website for the most) so I never use it, but I don’t usually use machine/automatic translations anyways.
I use Reverso’s Context feature very often and it helps immensely with translating and learning Mandarin, as well as other languages. However, keep in mind not every language has an equal amount of quality material. It’s not ideal for beginners either, because there’s no settings to make simpler sentences show up more.
As of October 13th, 2023, Reverso supports 26 languages!
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How To
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For this example, I’m going to search the Mandarin word “平常”
* Note: A majority of the database seems to use Simplified characters, so use Simplified most of the time or it may not recognize the word.
Now you can guess from context if you didn’t already have this word in your dictionary of choice: 平常 must mean ‘usually; normally; typical; etc.’
This feature works very well with common word combinations that don’t have a direct translation in a dictionary.
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Downsides
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One downside I notice a lot is that the highlighting will be incorrect or sometimes completely absent. Other times the English translation doesn’t match the example sentence at all. So, if you are not an intermediate learner be extra careful using the context function for translations.
For example, I searched the word “洒泪” (to be shedding tears) and the first result I got highlighted the translation as “during”!
But if you are signed in to the website, you can submit corrections easily.
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Please correct me if I made a mistake
Created October 2023
