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Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

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Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#81

Post by camillomiller »

jaclaz wrote: post #66
camillomiller wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Italian native with a classical studies background, this kind of words are easy for me. They're almost all Latin-derived and they usually sound very similar to the Italian equivalent. You wanna know what's hard for us? The street talk. You know like when you shoot the breeze before you really spill the beans about your shenanigans while riding shotgun on a friend's old jalopy.

Yes, beside those you listed (that are not common in a normal conversation) there is a large number of Latin derived words in English, as a rule of thumb, there are almost always two words in English a non-latin derived one and a latin derived one having more or less the same meaning (or a near enough one). Usually native English speaking people will use the non-latin one, but of course they also generally know it (o…

Exactly :)

My friends say that I usually sound "academic" more than snob.

Some time ago I witnessed this first-hand. I was at a speaking event, the speaker was Canadian. He said: "If you ever had the fortune to encounter [Mister XYZ]". I would have definitively expected something like: "If you were lucky to meet him"/"had the luck to have met him" or similar. He was native, but very academic indeed. :)

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#82

Post by camillomiller »

carlmungz wrote: post #71
camillomiller wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Italian native with a classical studies background, this kind of words are easy for me. They're almost all Latin-derived and they usually sound very similar to the Italian equivalent. You wanna know what's hard for us? The street talk. You know like when you shoot the breeze before you really spill the beans about your shenanigans while riding shotgun on a friend's old jalopy.

> You know like when you shoot the breeze before you really spill the beans about your shenanigans while riding shotgun on a friend's old jalopy. That sounds like quite the night out...

Well, in the early morn' we called a cab to steam off the debauchery and quit hopscotchin' around :)

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#83

Post by camillomiller »

mci wrote: post #61
camillomiller wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is any book like that available for contemporary languages?

Check out https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio... :)

Holy moly, you made a languages nerd's day

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#84

Post by microcolonel »

unhammer wrote: post #80
microcolonel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blessing of language is that word frequency follows a power law. The first couple hundred words cover much of the language anyway.

This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The other side of the coin is that the long tail is long : the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are hapax legomena [words appearing exactly once], and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena[words appearing exactly twice]. Thus, in the Brown Corpus of American…

Right, though I think the long tail is beyond the line between language and culture. There comes a point where additional words are not a matter of understanding utterances, but of following culture.

Effectively none of the English-speaking world would bother to say "Sochi" without the olympics, but they knew the English language and had enough culture to understand from context that it is a place in Russia which hosted the 2014 winter olympics.

If you know enough of the language that you can ask "what's that?" at a non-disruptive rate in conversation (or look it up quickly in a dictionary or encyclopedia), I think that counts as good enough.

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#85

Post by ekingr »

In the same vein, for French translation, Linguee[1] uses many sources from websites of organisations that display official content in several languages (eg. the websites of the EU, of the Canadian Parliament...). The fact that it's official texts (eg. laws) makes it quite reliable.

[1] http://www.linguee.fr

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#86

Post by dcsan »

I find there's a lot of material for studying isolated words, but as an engineer, analyzing the sentence patterns and grammar is more interesting.

I'm working on a project to do this for a database of Chinese grammar patterns. When there's enough sentence examples for each pattern as structured data, we can then make games and other learning tools. For example: yīnwèi / 因为 / because http://cgram.rikai-bots.com/grammar/yinwei

Now there's a magnets game to try to use that pattern: http://cgram.rikai-bots.com/magnets/?cnames=yinwei

I would be happy to share the repo with anyone who's interested, or using the data to make some other language learning games. PS I did a similar thing for japanese before: JGram.org and it really helped me learn japanese quickly.

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#87

Post by kafkaesq »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #9

Very cool! Although I feel that sometimes you really need a human touch to make it truly comprehended. For instance, I random clicked on "antediluvian": https://buildmyvocab.in/antediluvian/ Everything here will get you a "good enough" understanding of what the word means, but this is the only one that really comes close to explaining the word's literal meaning, and it's too vague to be of much use: any of the early…

In short, this is a good groundwork, but I think it needs a human editor to push the individual definitions from "acceptable" to "correct".

Good point. A StackOverflow-style upvoting system may provide exactly that.

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#88

Post by nandemo »

csa wrote: post #75
nandemo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this? 1. Get a frequency list. The most common word's rank is 1, the second is 2, etc. [0] 2. Then use your favorite Spaced Repetition Software (such as anki) to learn the words in that order. 3. Define a sentence's difficulty as the maximum rank over all its words. You could refine it by adding tie-breakers but I think it doesn't matter. Then sort the sentences in order of difficulty. [0] See https://en.wi…

Great idea but... The word "run" is a relatively high frequency word. How many different meanings for "run" does a learner need to know? Is that in isolation? With collocations? As phrasal verbs? In many languages, the most frequently appearing words also have the most varied meanings. Interestingly, many highly vernacular languages also use relatively few words, but those words have a lot of meanings that are clearl…

It's not just an idea, I've used it to learn about 2000 Hebrew words, albeit in a somewhat different form and along with other methods/materials.

I'm a somewhat experienced language learner. I'm fully aware that words have multiple meanings but that's not as problematic as you think. A lot of distinct meanings of "run" are related, so it's not like you need to memorize every one individually. Besides, they aren't all equally important. In many cases, those different meanings are paralled in my native language (or another language I know), e.g you can translate "run" as "correr" in "he runs", "the river runs..." and "they ran the risk...". More to the point, I always study words in context. In this method the context is provided by the rest of the sentence.

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#89

Post by [deleted] »

csa wrote: post #75
nandemo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this? 1. Get a frequency list. The most common word's rank is 1, the second is 2, etc. [0] 2. Then use your favorite Spaced Repetition Software (such as anki) to learn the words in that order. 3. Define a sentence's difficulty as the maximum rank over all its words. You could refine it by adding tie-breakers but I think it doesn't matter. Then sort the sentences in order of difficulty. [0] See https://en.wi…

Great idea but... The word "run" is a relatively high frequency word. How many different meanings for "run" does a learner need to know? Is that in isolation? With collocations? As phrasal verbs? In many languages, the most frequently appearing words also have the most varied meanings. Interestingly, many highly vernacular languages also use relatively few words, but those words have a lot of meanings that are clearl…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners

#90

Post by cmmike »

ramblerman wrote: post #64
cmmike wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clozemaster already offers this for over 100 language pairings via the Fluency Fast Track feature, https://www.clozemaster.com . Clozemaster's a game to learn and practice a language in context. The objective is to fill in the missing word in a given sentence for thousands of sentences. The missing word is the most difficult word in the sentence according to a frequency list for the language, and the Fluency Fast Tra…

I just spent an hour playing the fast track. As a Spanish learner with a strong foundation but struggling to get over the next hurdle this is just perfect. Thanks for this link!

Awesome - glad to hear!
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