BanDocStudying in a foreign language: how to read lecture slides
Studying in a foreign language? Skim headings and bold terms first, translate only the sentences that block you, and keep one term list per course.
Studying in a foreign language is slower because you are doing two jobs at once: decoding the language and learning the subject. The method that works best is to preview each set of lecture slides before class, translate only the sentences that block you, keep one term list per course in the exam's language, and test yourself on it a little every day. Below is that method step by step, with the research behind it.
Why is studying in a foreign language harder?
It is not only a feeling. A review of 190 studies on reading speed found that reading rates are lower "for readers with English as second language" (Brysbaert, 2019). If a slide deck takes you much longer than it takes your classmates, that is normal.
Studying in a second language also affects what you can do with the material afterwards. In one experiment, students who studied texts in their second language did as well on a true or false test as when they studied in their first language, but worse when they had to write down what they remembered. The authors warn that "students' performance may be underestimated if they are exclusively tested with essay-type exams in L2" (Vander Beken and Brysbaert, 2018). In practice: recognizing the right answer is easier than producing it, so your study time should include producing it.
Language level is a recurring difficulty in English-medium instruction (EMI). A systematic review of 83 studies on EMI in higher education reports: "Overwhelmingly though, students report insufficient levels of proficiency" (Macaro et al., 2018). The review covers English, but the problem it describes applies to any course taught in a language that is not your first, such as courses in Chinese for international students in Taiwan.
How to study lecture slides before the lecture
If your teacher posts the slides in advance, spend ten to fifteen minutes with them before class. Una Cunningham, professor emerita at Stockholm University, advises getting the lecturer's slides before lectures and annotating them in your first language (The Conversation, 2025).
A preview does not mean understanding everything. South Dakota State University's study guide tells students to skim each slide before class without trying to understand every concept yet (SDSU guide). The same guide suggests writing five to ten questions while you skim and listening for the answers in class.
Asking questions before you learn something tends to help. A 2023 review of research on prequestions found that answering questions before studying, even wrongly, can benefit learning "if there is an opportunity to study the correct answers afterwards" (Pan and Carpenter, 2023).
A five-minute preview:
- Read every heading in the original language.
- Mark the terms in bold, in boxes or in definitions. These are the words the teacher expects you to know.
- Look at every figure, table and formula. They often carry the main idea of the slide.
- Write down three to five questions the slides raise.
Translate only what blocks you
Read a paragraph or a slide first. If you can follow it, move on. If one sentence stops you, translate that sentence, not the whole deck.
- Find the term or phrase that blocks you.
- Look up its meaning in your own language.
- Read the sentence again in the original language.
Step 3 matters. The exam is written in the course language, so your memory has to attach the meaning to the original words, not only to the translation.
Machine translation is useful here, with care. Cunningham's advice includes a warning to "be careful of mistakes made by automatic translation". How careful depends on the language pair: in a study of hospital discharge instructions, Google Translate kept the meaning of 82.5% of sentences overall, but accuracy ranged from 55% to 94% across languages (Taira et al., 2021). That was medical text, not lecture slides, but the lesson carries over: the original page is the reference, and the translation is a reading aid.
Technical terms are where translations go wrong most quietly. A term can come out in a form that is correct in one country and unknown in another. Our data page on Taiwan vs mainland Chinese technical terms shows how often this happens in Chinese: 51.4% of 6,126 official term pairs use different words on each side.
If you are thinking of using an AI notebook to read a PDF for you, read whether NotebookLM can translate a PDF first. It answers questions about the file in your language, which is a different job from giving you the handout in your language.
Keep one list of terms per course
Terms repeat. A word you meet in week two comes back in week eight, sometimes with a small change in meaning. Keep one list for the whole course instead of a new list for each set of slides. Cunningham suggests the same: keep a list of key terms and add translations into your strongest languages.
For each term, write three things:
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| The term in the course language | The exact wording used on the slide |
| The meaning in your language | One short line, in your own words |
| Where you met it | Lecture number and slide or page number |
The slide number is the part most students skip. It lets you go back to the sentence where the term lived, which is much easier to remember than a bare word.
How do you remember what you read in a second language?
Rereading feels productive, but it is one of the weakest ways to study. A large review of ten study techniques rated practice testing and distributed practice as high utility, and rated highlighting and rereading as low utility (Dunlosky et al., 2013). In a classic experiment, students who tested themselves remembered much more after two days and after a week than students who reread the same text, even though the rereaders felt more confident (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006).
For a student working in a second language, testing yourself has a second benefit: it trains you to produce the course language, which is what an essay or short-answer exam asks for.
Ways to test yourself on lecture slides:
- Cover the slide, say what it was about, then check.
- Answer the questions you wrote during the preview without notes.
- Explain one slide to a classmate, in either language, then name the key terms in the course language.
- Turn the terms and the questions you got wrong into flashcards. The SDSU guide warns: "Do not turn every bullet point into a flashcard."
Review a little every day
Short reviews spread out over time beat one long review. A meta-analysis of 317 experiments on spaced practice found that the best gap between study sessions grows with how long you need to remember the material (Cepeda et al., 2006). For an exam three weeks away, that means returning to each term several times over those weeks, not once.
A simple plan for the two weeks before an exam:
- Count the terms on your course list and divide by the days left. That is your daily number.
- Each day, say the meaning before you check the answer.
- Put the terms you missed into tomorrow's group as well.
Use people as well as tools
Tools help you read; people help you understand. Cunningham recommends study groups with classmates who share your language and asking questions in class, which also shows the lecturer what is difficult. Office hours work the same way: bring two or three specific questions from your preview list. If you want to record a lecture, ask the lecturer first.
Where BanDoc fits
BanDoc lays the translation over the original layout of your handout or slides, shows the original with one tap, and gathers the terms of each course into one list that you review each day. You can try it with one handout or read about the plans.
