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I went to an interesting talk once at the Boston Python meetup, where a guy figured out how to order sentences so could learn them in an order where you already
by cschmidt 9y ago
I went to an interesting talk once at the Boston Python meetup, where a guy figured out how to order sentences so could learn them in an order where you already knew the "other" words in the sentence. Basically, making a directed graph of vocabulary.
He was doing it to learn Latin, but you could do it for any language.
- projectorlochsa 9y agoThere's a very good book for Latin that uses that trick. Goes from zero to extremely complex Latin. Whole book is in Latin, no translations. https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205 https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia... The only requirement is knowledge of orthographic alphabet and how each sound is produced. Latin, fortunately, has very simple sounds compared to English or Swedish. It took me about 2 years to go through both parts and I was amazed at how easy the journey was. Could speak and write Latin fluently without issues.
- camillomiller 9y agoIs any book like that available for contemporary languages?
- wofo 9y agoI learned Dutch using a similar approach (https://www.amazon.com/Delftse-Methode-Nederlands-voor-buitenlanders/dp/9085067200/ https://www.amazon.com/Delftse-Methode-Nederlands-voor-buite...)
- mci 9y agoCheck out https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazione/metodo-diretto-applicato-alle-lingue-moderne https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio... :)
- dpfu 9y agoThis is a awesome resource, thanks a lot! Some of these books are of course quite old. For example I would not recommend trying to learning contemporary German using this [1] book. Reading 'fraktur' alone can be rather challenging … [1] [Worman, J. H.: Erstes Deutsches Buch, nach der Natürlichen Methode, für Schule und Haus, American Book Company, New York 1880](https://vivariumnovum.it/edizioni/libri/dominio-pubblico/Worman%20-%20Erstes%20Deutsches%20book.pdf https://vivariumnovum.it/edizioni/libri/dominio-pubblico/Wor...)
- camillomiller 9y agoHoly moly, you made a languages nerd's day
- stefanwlb 9y agoAre you aware of something similar for Biblical Greek?
- peterburkimsher 9y agostefan - I'm building http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io for studying Chinese, and reading the Bible every day to practice. I already forked the code to make a version to help Chinese speakers learn English. I thought about Biblical Greek & Hebrew & Aramaic & Latin, but I wasn't sure if there's a market. Evidently there is! The biggest challenge is making a good dictionary. If I write the code, could you help to fix the dictionary?
- SilasX 9y agoDon't you have to have the translations at some point, or at least some side channel (i.e. an illustration that the phrase refers to), in order to "ground the symbols"?
- schoen 9y agoI have this book and I can tell you that it does use illustrations quite a bit (although most vocabulary is ultimately probably defined using other words). The very first chapter presents a labeled map of the Mediterranean region and begins: "Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Eurōpā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. Hispānia quoque in Eurōpā est. Hispānia et Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. Aegyptus in Eurōpā nōn est, Aegyptus in Āfricā est. Gallia nōn in Āfricā est, Gallia est in Eurōpā. Syria nōn est in Eurōpā, sed in Asiā. Arabia quoque in Asiā est. Syria et Arabia in Asiā sunt. Germaia nōn in Asiā, sed in Eurōpā est. Britannia quoque in Eurōpā est. Germānia et Britannia sunt in Eurōpā." There are marginal notes highlighting things that the author wants you to notice or learn from the examples. Especially at the beginning, the marginal notes often do not discuss things in complete sentences but simply highlight particular grammatical features; for example the notes to the part I just quoted say "-a -ā: Italia...; in Italiā", which is supposed to make you realize that somehow the ending -a changes to -ā when something is "in" something (which later will be revealed to be the Latin ablative case), and "est sunt: Italia in Eurōpā est; Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt", which is supposed to make you realize that sunt 'are' is the plural of est 'is'.
- SilasX 9y agoI want that, for every language I want to learn! Edit: Before anyone says it, in my original comment, that should have been an e.g. instead of an i.e.
- mijoharas 9y agoThanks to you I just learnt the difference between those two. Thanks! (Also writing this comment reminded me of this https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ )
- nandemo 9y agoHow about this? 1. Get a frequency list. The most common word's rank is 1, the second is 2, etc. [0] 2. Then use your favorite Spaced Repetition Software (such as anki) to learn the words in that order. 3. Define a sentence's difficulty as the maximum rank over all its words. You could refine it by adding tie-breakers but I think it doesn't matter. Then sort the sentences in order of difficulty. [0] See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists
- cmmike 9y agoClozemaster already offers this for over 100 language pairings via the Fluency Fast Track feature, https://www.clozemaster.com https://www.clozemaster.com. Clozemaster's a game to learn and practice a language in context. The objective is to fill in the missing word in a given sentence for thousands of sentences. The missing word is the most difficult word in the sentence according to a frequency list for the language, and the Fluency Fast Track feature allows you to play a sentence for each unique missing word in order of difficulty like you described.
- ramblerman 9y agoI just spent an hour playing the fast track. As a Spanish learner with a strong foundation but struggling to get over the next hurdle this is just perfect. Thanks for this link!
- cmmike 9y agoAwesome - glad to hear!
- microcolonel 9y agoThe blessing of language is that word frequency follows a power law. The first couple hundred words cover much of the language anyway.
- unhammer 9y ago
- biesnecker 9y agoI built something like this for Mandarin Chinese at a company I worked for in Shanghai, but the company was acquired and sort of put out to pasture, and it never launched. :-( Essentially, we took already word-segmented dialog (splitting Chinese sentences into individual words is non-trivial, so having it already segmented was super useful), matched it to words that you knew, and suggested the next lesson you should learn by the percentage of vocabulary that would be new or challenging for you. It was pretty awesome, would love to have another shot at it someday.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoI would love to have a chance to try it! A couple hundred hours into learning Chinese, and that sounds useful. Any chance you can release it? ....if not, what would you consider your best competition?
- peterburkimsher 9y agoI'm working on http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io which also does word spacing, and literal translations.
- biesnecker 9y agoSadly this was about six years ago. The code and the platform it was built on are long gone. I don't know of anyone else who is doing exactly the same thing, though Allset Learning in Shanghai (run by a friend and fellow ex-employee of the company I built this thing at) is making graded readers built around similar ideas. Not really the same as an adaptive system, though.
- tdeck 9y agoYears ago I found a great example of this on the letter level for learning Cyrillic - takes only a couple minutes to run through and it's really satisfying: http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/alphabet.html http://www.alphadictionary.com/rusgrammar/alphabet.html
- LoSboccacc 9y agodon't Assimil courses work like that? not word by word but definitely builds up on common words to reach ever complex sentences
- Faaak 9y agoI would be really interested in a German version of this. I wanted to do more a less the same: a "translator" that translates a German text content into a german text but by replacing words you don't know (e.g. extracted from memrise) into words you know. That way you can start reading texts of your foreign language without looking at your dictionary every sentence.