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Say, my daughter has a question in Vietnamese and it looks like this.

Bob wanted to by some food today. He bought eggs and cheese at a grocery's.... Then, she went to a supermarket for some vegetables....

1-put correct words on the dotted line.

Bob bought .....

Then, she wrote "Bob bought eggs and cheese". She missed out vegetables.

It was like she skimmed the paragraph for the word "bought" and used the information from that sentence but did not understand the whole paragraph.

Then, I told her "don't do it mechanically like that. you have to understand the whole passage" (literally translated from Vietnamese which is my mother's tongue).

The adverb "mechanically" in English might mean differently

mechanically: without thinking about what you are doing, especially because you do something often:

"Thank you," replied the ticket collector mechanically as he took each ticket.

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    Surely the issues is whether your daughter understood it? To me it's not an incorrect use of mechanically, but I wouldn't expect a child, even a native English speaker, to understand it till they were older.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Dec 3 at 10:05
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    Could be she thought "she" did not refer to Bob, who was earlier a "he". "Then, she went to a supermarket for some vegetables"
    – TimR
    Commented Dec 3 at 10:16
  • @TimR That might be a translation artefact. IIRC some Vietnamese personal pronouns may be genderless.
    – shoover
    Commented Dec 3 at 20:41

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Your use of the word "mechanically" is apt with respect to the "algorithm" you think she used: look for words relating to purchase and gather the items purchased from the sentence(s) in which any such word appears.

Whether that's an accurate assessment of her method is not for us to say. Could be she doesn't know the words "supermarket" and "vegetables". Could be she grew weary of the exercise. We don't know.

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'mechanically' means figuratively 'without much thinking and automatically'. I think 'do it with more caution or attention' would be a better remark for children. She was not mechanical but unwitting.

So 'mechanically' seems to be an inappropriate word.

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  • What's the difference between "without thinking and automatically" and lacking in "caution or attention" here?
    – Stuart F
    Commented Dec 3 at 10:06
  • 'do machanically' is different from 'lack in caution': the former doesn't necessarily include a mistake/mistakes, whereas the latter usually involves making a mistake/mistakes
    – gomadeng
    Commented Dec 3 at 10:18
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    @gomadeng When used as an admonition as in this case, it does imply mistakes. Doing something mechanically isn't always bad, but when someone tells you not to do it that way, it means that it is. In this particular context of using a mechanical approach where it should not be used, it absolutely connotes that the person was not sufficiently careful, and that they instead blindly applied a method without thought. In other contexts where it is appropriate, however, a mechanical approach might be desired, instead connoting consistency of the output rather than a lack of thought.
    – Nuclear Hoagie
    Commented Dec 3 at 18:07
  • That's right. Mechanical approach is designed to make human beings as efficient as possible like a tool, lacking in humanism.
    – gomadeng
    Commented Dec 3 at 18:20
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As others have said, "mechanically" is fine in this context.

Since this is ELL, I thought I'd also note you could say:

"Don't just skim through the passage, read the whole thing to understand the full context"

From M-W:

Skim [verb]
...
2: to read, study, or examine superficially and rapidly, especially: to glance through (something, such as a book) for the chief ideas or the plot ....

5: to pass swiftly or lightly over

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