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TL;DR Nearly half of the word occurrences in Harry Potter are prepositions, so if you learn a small number of them you can claim that you "understand half of Ha

TL;DR Nearly half of the word occurrences in Harry Potter are prepositions, so if you learn a small number of them you can claim that you "understand half of Harry Potter". For example, you can absorb sparking dialogue like the following: "Harry and to at to I to with Voldemort or what to and I do for, Hermoine!!"

jenius 15y ago
Yeah really, this is absolutely dumb. How did this get to the front page of hacker news? Knowing those words will literally get you nowhere if you are trying to learn spanish. This is like trying to learn a javascript and finding that in reality it's not that hard because half the language is open and close parens, semicolons, and the word "function". Fluent in javascript!
- thisisstupid 15y ago
  The logical implication is that a lot of people on HN aren't that bright.
- skore 15y ago
  "If you read this far, you should follow me on Twitter." I remember there was an article about this a while back which concluded that using the words "you should follow me" gets the highest conversion of readers to twitter followers. This guy gets a front page post and is at 208 followers. Maybe we can finally lay it to rest as yet another instance of the useless lifehacker circlejerk cargo cultist behavior and agree that the only thing that makes people follow your feed is good content? Please?
kiiski 15y ago
One should also remember that not all languages use so many prepositions. In Finnish, for example, we usually change the ending of a word instead of using prepositions. For example, the previous paragraph in Finnish: "Pitää myös muistaa, että kaikissa kielissä ei käytetä yhtä paljon prepositioita. Suomessa, esimerkiksi, muutamme yleensä sanan loppua preposition käyttämisen sijasta"
- ajuc 15y ago
  Yeah. In Slavic languages it's similiar - it's all about post- and prefixes. Each verb has like 15 or more versions, which to use depends on tense, how many people are performing action, are there any males in that group, is the subject of the action human, was the action finished (or will it be finished), etc. It's all included into each verb. Example in Polish: "Policzyłyście długopisy?" means "Have you (more than one person, no males in the group) finished counting pens?" If you started counting, but then something interrupted you, and there were some males in the group (and you feel it needs to be pointed out), you can just answer with "Liczyliśmy", and the whole meaning is preserved :)
  - nathell 15y ago
    Correction: the number of verb forms in Polish can exceed a hundred. Cf. http://www.sjp.pl/gra%C4%87 http://www.sjp.pl/gra%C4%87 which lists 102 forms for a random verb (GRAĆ 'to play').
    - ajuc 15y ago
      Many of these are not verbs but adjectives etc. Still, I stand corrected - there are much more verb forms than I thought :)
frooxie 15y ago
David Moser, in his text "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", points out that Even though you may know 95% of the [words] in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very [words] that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".
- wisty 15y ago
  If you understand 95% of words, you can start learning with authentic material and a dictionary. Of course, Chinese is a little hard (stroke order is harder than alphabetical, and you can't guess the meaning as easily like you can with a related language like German), but ... it's still a good way to go. Of course, almost every language teacher on the planet will recommend you start with common words and pattens (grammer, phrases, etc), then learn less common stuff. It's not a revelation.
  - frooxie 15y ago
    My point was that understanding a certain percentage of the words is very different from understanding the same percentage of the sentences in a book.
- ajuc 15y ago
  I've had similiar problem, and I've found that's not a problem at all. I was reading sci-fi book with many unknown (to me) words. Most of the time I had not bothered to check dictionary, because you could guess from the context what the missing words mean. If not right away - maybe the next time you encounter the same word. Or because you see how characters in the book reacts to our hero phaser. It's actually quite addictive - it feels like you're not only reading a story, but also solving a riddle. When I wanted to check every word, it quickly became a chore, and I've lost motivation to read further. So I recommend this way of reading foreign literature - for me it was very effective.
  - DanBC 15y ago

jenius 15y ago

Yeah really, this is absolutely dumb. How did this get to the front page of hacker news? Knowing those words will literally get you nowhere if you are trying to learn spanish. This is like trying to learn a javascript and finding that in reality it's not that hard because half the language is open and close parens, semicolons, and the word "function". Fluent in javascript!

thisisstupid 15y ago
The logical implication is that a lot of people on HN aren't that bright.
skore 15y ago
"If you read this far, you should follow me on Twitter." I remember there was an article about this a while back which concluded that using the words "you should follow me" gets the highest conversion of readers to twitter followers. This guy gets a front page post and is at 208 followers. Maybe we can finally lay it to rest as yet another instance of the useless lifehacker circlejerk cargo cultist behavior and agree that the only thing that makes people follow your feed is good content? Please?

kiiski 15y ago

One should also remember that not all languages use so many prepositions. In Finnish, for example, we usually change the ending of a word instead of using prepositions. For example, the previous paragraph in Finnish: "Pitää myös muistaa, että kaikissa kielissä ei käytetä yhtä paljon prepositioita. Suomessa, esimerkiksi, muutamme yleensä sanan loppua preposition käyttämisen sijasta"

ajuc 15y ago
Yeah. In Slavic languages it's similiar - it's all about post- and prefixes. Each verb has like 15 or more versions, which to use depends on tense, how many people are performing action, are there any males in that group, is the subject of the action human, was the action finished (or will it be finished), etc. It's all included into each verb. Example in Polish: "Policzyłyście długopisy?" means "Have you (more than one person, no males in the group) finished counting pens?" If you started counting, but then something interrupted you, and there were some males in the group (and you feel it needs to be pointed out), you can just answer with "Liczyliśmy", and the whole meaning is preserved :)
- nathell 15y ago
  Correction: the number of verb forms in Polish can exceed a hundred. Cf. http://www.sjp.pl/gra%C4%87 http://www.sjp.pl/gra%C4%87 which lists 102 forms for a random verb (GRAĆ 'to play').
  - ajuc 15y ago
    Many of these are not verbs but adjectives etc. Still, I stand corrected - there are much more verb forms than I thought :)

frooxie 15y ago

David Moser, in his text "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", points out that Even though you may know 95% of the [words] in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very [words] that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".

wisty 15y ago
If you understand 95% of words, you can start learning with authentic material and a dictionary. Of course, Chinese is a little hard (stroke order is harder than alphabetical, and you can't guess the meaning as easily like you can with a related language like German), but ... it's still a good way to go. Of course, almost every language teacher on the planet will recommend you start with common words and pattens (grammer, phrases, etc), then learn less common stuff. It's not a revelation.
- frooxie 15y ago
  My point was that understanding a certain percentage of the words is very different from understanding the same percentage of the sentences in a book.
ajuc 15y ago
I've had similiar problem, and I've found that's not a problem at all. I was reading sci-fi book with many unknown (to me) words. Most of the time I had not bothered to check dictionary, because you could guess from the context what the missing words mean. If not right away - maybe the next time you encounter the same word. Or because you see how characters in the book reacts to our hero phaser. It's actually quite addictive - it feels like you're not only reading a story, but also solving a riddle. When I wanted to check every word, it quickly became a chore, and I've lost motivation to read further. So I recommend this way of reading foreign literature - for me it was very effective.
- DanBC 15y ago