3 ms·

I like the approach but I think it's a big mistake to not strip stop words. He should focus on nouns and verbs imo. The top words he lists are all stopwords/gra

by hkolek 15y ago

I like the approach but I think it's a big mistake to not strip stop words. He should focus on nouns and verbs imo. The top words he lists are all stopwords/grammatical particles "de", "que", "la", "y" etc. I don't think knowing those words will help to understand anything. I think if you understand only the grammatical particles in a sentence it won't help at all to understand the meaning of the sentence. On the other hand if you know the verbs and nouns but not the grammatical particles you can at least infer some meaning or what it's about.

legierski 15y ago
You can always print out, let's say, 50 top words and not bother with "de", "que", etc.
aohtsab 15y ago
When I was starting out in German, I started listening to the audiobooks and reading the German text. Knowing the small words (prepositions and other stopwords) isn't of much use on its own, but having a general feel for the plot and knowing the context of what 'should be happening' in the book helped give me a much broader understanding (and richer vocabulary!) than merely ploughing through the German 101 textbook. tl;dr: Applaud the idea, but it's misguided. You need to focus on understanding words in greater context to derive any meaning.
- vidarh 15y ago
  My final year I forced my way through Faust by using an old Danish translation side by side with the German version to bring my grade up. I'm Norwegian, so the old Danish translation gave me a "halfway house" - modern Danish is very understandable for a Norwegian; older Danish gets quite a bit closer to German. I still missed a lot of what was going on, but it brought me up a full grade in a semester. Of course I'd probably had done just as well with less effort had I chosen something easier - I was being pretentious about it.

3 ms·

I like the approach but I think it's a big mistake to not strip stop words. He should focus on nouns and verbs imo. The top words he lists are all stopwords/gra

by hkolek 15y ago

legierski 15y ago
You can always print out, let's say, 50 top words and not bother with "de", "que", etc.
aohtsab 15y ago
When I was starting out in German, I started listening to the audiobooks and reading the German text. Knowing the small words (prepositions and other stopwords) isn't of much use on its own, but having a general feel for the plot and knowing the context of what 'should be happening' in the book helped give me a much broader understanding (and richer vocabulary!) than merely ploughing through the German 101 textbook. tl;dr: Applaud the idea, but it's misguided. You need to focus on understanding words in greater context to derive any meaning.
- vidarh 15y ago
  My final year I forced my way through Faust by using an old Danish translation side by side with the German version to bring my grade up. I'm Norwegian, so the old Danish translation gave me a "halfway house" - modern Danish is very understandable for a Norwegian; older Danish gets quite a bit closer to German. I still missed a lot of what was going on, but it brought me up a full grade in a semester. Of course I'd probably had done just as well with less effort had I chosen something easier - I was being pretentious about it.