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Although it sounds high, recognising 90% of words makes for a pretty horrible reading experience. That's 1 word in 10 that you don't know (1-2 words per senten

by imron 9y ago

Although it sounds high, recognising 90% of words makes for a pretty horrible reading experience. That's 1 word in 10 that you don't know (1-2 words per sentence), or assuming as you did in that post a page length of 300 words, then it's 30 new words a page. I actually recently wrote an article discussing the same phenomenon in Chinese [0] Where to get a reasonable level of new characters (e.g. no more than 1 a page) you'd need to know 99.8% of the text on any page. And the level of recognition required to be able to recognise and learn new words completely from context is about 98%. [1] 0: https://www.chinesethehardway.com/article/hsk-6-gets-you-halfway/ https://www.chinesethehardway.com/article/hsk-6-gets-you-hal... 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYMZZISPrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYMZZISPrU

maaaats 9y ago
I've read a lot of books in languages I didn't know well at the time. I often got the gist of the story. Mostly unknown adjectives describing possibly unknown objects to set the mood. Of course the story is not as good without, but it works.
jaclaz 9y ago
I know nothing of Chinese, but in western languages, like English, a number of words may be "unique" when counted by a simple algorithm, (even if - as the author did - words were reduced to their "basic form" thus deduplicating a lot of slightly different forms) but often you can get the meaning of the word by the context and by similarities with other knwown words, so the 90% percentage while actually meaning that you don't know 1 word every 10, does not directly mean that you cannot understand 1 word every 10 or that your reading experience is so horrible. Every reader attempting to learn a new language goes through that odd phase where he/she can manage to understand the overall meaning of a sentence even if there is one or two "holes" in it, and actually it is part of the learning process.
- imron 9y ago
  Although you might be able to pick up the meaning or get the gist of the occasional word at 1 in 10, the video I linked to in [1] above makes a convincing case that the rate at which unknown words stop being a hindrance to understanding and can be picked up from context is around 98%
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    Most probably that 98% is an extremely accurate number, along the metrics of the professor, and I was not commenting on that video (that I didn't watch), I was only relating what in my experience happens, in my experience it isn't so horrible and I am still within that experience with more than one language where I scarcely reach 70 or (maybe) 80%.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
It is a horrible reading experience. But it gets better as you learn, and you get a more interesting story than a child's story (though not as much culture).
- imron 9y ago
  I agree there is utility in it (and have done reading at that level of comprehension and below), and it's more interesting than children's stories, and it's a great way to improve your vocabulary, I was just pointing out that despite sounding good 90% comprehension falls well short of comfortable reading and you're better off trying to read easier texts than struggle with more difficult ones. In fact that was one of the reasons why I made a program called Chinese Text Analyser [0], so that you could quickly identify suitable texts based on your current vocabulary without needing to read the novel first. 0: https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/ https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/
peterburkimsher 9y ago
Speaking of Chinese, I wrote http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io to add pinyin, tone colours, literal translations, and a real translation to Chinese text. I use it every day for reading the Bible, and I also processed music lyrics, movie subtitles, and restaurant menus with it. I also made my own keyboard that works by decomposing characters into their radicals. You can also load Word Lists (HSK or TOCFL) to highlight the words you know, or hash-out the characters in the text that you don't know. Please tell me how to market it. I keep posting on here when I finish new projects that use Pingtype, but I still haven't got many users.

by imron 9y ago

maaaats 9y ago

I've read a lot of books in languages I didn't know well at the time. I often got the gist of the story. Mostly unknown adjectives describing possibly unknown objects to set the mood. Of course the story is not as good without, but it works.

jaclaz 9y ago

I know nothing of Chinese, but in western languages, like English, a number of words may be "unique" when counted by a simple algorithm, (even if - as the author did - words were reduced to their "basic form" thus deduplicating a lot of slightly different forms) but often you can get the meaning of the word by the context and by similarities with other knwown words, so the 90% percentage while actually meaning that you don't know 1 word every 10, does not directly mean that you cannot understand 1 word every 10 or that your reading experience is so horrible. Every reader attempting to learn a new language goes through that odd phase where he/she can manage to understand the overall meaning of a sentence even if there is one or two "holes" in it, and actually it is part of the learning process.

imron 9y ago
Although you might be able to pick up the meaning or get the gist of the occasional word at 1 in 10, the video I linked to in [1] above makes a convincing case that the rate at which unknown words stop being a hindrance to understanding and can be picked up from context is around 98%
- jaclaz 9y ago
  Most probably that 98% is an extremely accurate number, along the metrics of the professor, and I was not commenting on that video (that I didn't watch), I was only relating what in my experience happens, in my experience it isn't so horrible and I am still within that experience with more than one language where I scarcely reach 70 or (maybe) 80%.

Broken_Hippo 9y ago

It is a horrible reading experience. But it gets better as you learn, and you get a more interesting story than a child's story (though not as much culture).

imron 9y ago
I agree there is utility in it (and have done reading at that level of comprehension and below), and it's more interesting than children's stories, and it's a great way to improve your vocabulary, I was just pointing out that despite sounding good 90% comprehension falls well short of comfortable reading and you're better off trying to read easier texts than struggle with more difficult ones. In fact that was one of the reasons why I made a program called Chinese Text Analyser [0], so that you could quickly identify suitable texts based on your current vocabulary without needing to read the novel first. 0: https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/ https://www.chinesetextanalyser.com/

peterburkimsher 9y ago

Speaking of Chinese, I wrote http://pingtype.github.io http://pingtype.github.io to add pinyin, tone colours, literal translations, and a real translation to Chinese text. I use it every day for reading the Bible, and I also processed music lyrics, movie subtitles, and restaurant menus with it. I also made my own keyboard that works by decomposing characters into their radicals. You can also load Word Lists (HSK or TOCFL) to highlight the words you know, or hash-out the characters in the text that you don't know. Please tell me how to market it. I keep posting on here when I finish new projects that use Pingtype, but I still haven't got many users.