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I wonder if there's any particularly good way to gamify learning grammar, though— you can't really quantify it in the same way as you can vocabulary. My favori
by jeorgun 13y ago
I wonder if there's any particularly good way to gamify learning grammar, though— you can't really quantify it in the same way as you can vocabulary.
My favorite suggestion for online language learning, whose source I've long since forgotten, is to have a story / article / other piece of writing that gradually transitions from English grammar to language-being-learned's grammar, then performs a similar transition over vocabulary (like http://dotsies.org/stories/the-lamplighter.html http://dotsies.org/stories/the-lamplighter.html , but with an alternate language instead of alphabet).
I haven't seen any implementations of this, and it'd probably be practically impossible to automate, but feel like it has some potential.
- Void_ 13y agoIn schools they use tests to quantify knowledge of grammar. Forget about grades, collect eggs, wooden sticks or whatever, and there you have your gamification.
- anateus 13y agoThe approach of the Michel Thomas Method is the closest thing I've seen to teaching grammar in a way that directly exercises our grammar-learning ability. In their audio, there is a teacher and two students. The phrases and words you are taught are not anchored in practical usage the way Pimsleur does, but are more random. However, the exercise portions require you to construct completely novel arrangements. That is, let's say they taught you how to say "I want a cookie" and "She hates cats" you would be asked to say "She hates cookies".
- baby 13y agoThe first thing I wanted to do when I finished reading the dotsies story, was implementing that for chinese.
- NoahTheDuke 13y agoWow, dotsies is awesome.
- maaku 13y agoYes, the method is simple: massive exposure to input (see the Assimil "without toil" series for a good example). Using spaced repetition and NLP you could introduce gradated input customized to the user to provide ever increasing vocabulary and grammar points. This is a practical version of what your dotsies example would look like, individually adapted to users. I've actually thought long and hard about how one would construct such a site and what the algorithms would look like to provide effective language learning. It's just one more thing I don't have the time to actually do, however, as much as I would love to actually use the site... EDIT: If someone actually wants to do this, email me.
- cgag 13y agoWhere might I find your email? I've thought a good bit about this too, I actually bought extensivereader.com a few years ago as a placeholder when I was experimenting with building something, and have recently been considering attacking it again. edit: I'll assume you're maaku on github.
- maaku 13y agoHuh, for some reason I thought HN had a way of emailing users. I added my email to my about field in my profile.