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Duolingo sucks though. So does Memrise. And you can build an anki deck, sure — but not all decks are created equal. If you don't make a frequency list from a la

Duolingo sucks though. So does Memrise. And you can build an anki deck, sure — but not all decks are created equal. If you don't make a frequency list from a large corpus, your Anki deck sucks too. Duolingo and Memrise seem to have the philosophy, "There are many words in the language you're learning. Here are some of them." This is really bad. Because word frequencies follow a Zipfian distribution, if you learn the top 1,000 words in a language you're a long way forward. If you learn an arbitrary 1,000 sample of words in a 40,000 word vocabulary, you're much further back. These guys seem to have this as their specific value proposation. I was going to do exactly this myself. I'm a computational linguist who's recently moved to Germany. I got about 2/3 of the way through the Duolingo course, but it's basically a waste of time. They taught me the words for "duck" and "ceiling" and "handyman" as part of the first 1,000 words in the course.

wodenokoto 11y ago
Interesting point. As I noted elsewhere, I do agree that there is room for improvements in this space. I admit that my post is mostly fuelled by being annoyed with their marketing copy. I think you need to be more careful about what are useful words. I remember my Japanese text book introduced the word for alien fairly early, and I thought it was stupid. Once I came to Japan, I realised if I had learned that word, I could say more funny things in my very limited conversations. When I was studying in China, we were introduced to the word for diarrhea and how to describe the texture of our stool within the first 2 months. Hardly top 1.000 words, but if you've ever lived in China, you realise it can come quite in handy! Frequency lists are often heavily influenced by newspapers and that is probably not representative of the things you will need in daily life or conversations. I have wondered if subtitles are more representative of normal conversations, and there are some research into building corpus from that, but I'm not really sure how you test the utility of your corpus.
- syllogism 11y ago
  Newspapers are likely a bad choice, yes. I've thought about this a bit. Subtitles seem good, and there are corpora of casual speech. I plan to heavily bias towards verbs. Nouns are much more long-tailed, and their frequency is "bursty" --- if the noun is relevant to the situation, it'll be used a lot. So you can get them when you need them. Otherwise you can always use a pronoun, or be vaguer.

wodenokoto 11y ago

Interesting point. As I noted elsewhere, I do agree that there is room for improvements in this space. I admit that my post is mostly fuelled by being annoyed with their marketing copy. I think you need to be more careful about what are useful words. I remember my Japanese text book introduced the word for alien fairly early, and I thought it was stupid. Once I came to Japan, I realised if I had learned that word, I could say more funny things in my very limited conversations. When I was studying in China, we were introduced to the word for diarrhea and how to describe the texture of our stool within the first 2 months. Hardly top 1.000 words, but if you've ever lived in China, you realise it can come quite in handy! Frequency lists are often heavily influenced by newspapers and that is probably not representative of the things you will need in daily life or conversations. I have wondered if subtitles are more representative of normal conversations, and there are some research into building corpus from that, but I'm not really sure how you test the utility of your corpus.

syllogism 11y ago
Newspapers are likely a bad choice, yes. I've thought about this a bit. Subtitles seem good, and there are corpora of casual speech. I plan to heavily bias towards verbs. Nouns are much more long-tailed, and their frequency is "bursty" --- if the noun is relevant to the situation, it'll be used a lot. So you can get them when you need them. Otherwise you can always use a pronoun, or be vaguer.