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1. I don't really understand what this is about. Having a description on the landing page would help. > Barron's 800 Words list with example sentences who is this Barron? 2. Please can you add pronunciation :D 3. words need a definition as well, not sure what some of these means even with the examples.
I went to an interesting talk once at the Boston Python meetup, where a guy figured out how to order sentences so could learn them in an order where you already knew the "other" words in the sentence. Basically, making a directed graph of vocabulary. He was doing it to learn Latin, but you could do it for any language.
There's a very good book for Latin that uses that trick. Goes from zero to extremely complex Latin. Whole book is in Latin, no translations. https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia... The only requirement is knowledge of orthographic alphabet and how each sound is produced. Latin, fortunately, has very simple sounds compared to English or Swedish. It took me about 2 years to go through both parts…
Could something similar be done with other languages as well, say Simplified Chinese?
Otherwise, if you can find a large corpus, segment it into words and do some basic statistics, you could build something like this for any language.
The most similar implementation I am aware of (using the word 中文 (Chinese) as an example) is http://ce.linedict.com/#/cnen/example?query=%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%...
How do you decide on which sentences to use? I'm interested in generating example sentences myself, but in a way, that chooses sentences that are simple, easy to understand and support the word, they are supposed to exemplify. For example "She got a car for her birthday, while she was traveling in Italy eating pizza" does not tell the reader anything about what a car is, or how the word should be used. However "He dr…
You could check to see if there are some verbs that are used predominately with the word you're trying to generate sentences for. Example, I would expect "drive" appearing in a sentence to carry a higher than average probability for "car" also appearing in the sentence. Or "wind" for "watch", or "sit" for "chair" and "couch".
Then, I think sentences containing "car" that also contain the verb "drive" would probably give better clues for the meaning of "car" than verbs like "bought".
Just a thought.
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I built something like this for Mandarin Chinese at a company I worked for in Shanghai, but the company was acquired and sort of put out to pasture, and it never launched. :-( Essentially, we took already word-segmented dialog (splitting Chinese sentences into individual words is non-trivial, so having it already segmented was super useful), matched it to words that you knew, and suggested the next lesson you should…
I would love to have a chance to try it! A couple hundred hours into learning Chinese, and that sounds useful. Any chance you can release it? ....if not, what would you consider your best competition?
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There's a very good book for Latin that uses that trick. Goes from zero to extremely complex Latin. Whole book is in Latin, no translations. https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia... The only requirement is knowledge of orthographic alphabet and how each sound is produced. Latin, fortunately, has very simple sounds compared to English or Swedish. It took me about 2 years to go through both parts…
Don't you have to have the translations at some point, or at least some side channel (i.e. an illustration that the phrase refers to), in order to "ground the symbols"?
"Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Eurōpā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. Hispānia quoque in Eurōpā est. Hispānia et Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. Aegyptus in Eurōpā nōn est, Aegyptus in Āfricā est. Gallia nōn in Āfricā est, Gallia est in Eurōpā. Syria nōn est in Eurōpā, sed in Asiā. Arabia quoque in Asiā est. Syria et Arabia in Asiā sunt. Germaia nōn in Asiā, sed in Eurōpā est. Britannia quoque in Eurōpā est. Germānia et Britannia sunt in Eurōpā."
There are marginal notes highlighting things that the author wants you to notice or learn from the examples. Especially at the beginning, the marginal notes often do not discuss things in complete sentences but simply highlight particular grammatical features; for example the notes to the part I just quoted say "-a -ā: Italia...; in Italiā", which is supposed to make you realize that somehow the ending -a changes to -ā when something is "in" something (which later will be revealed to be the Latin ablative case), and "est sunt: Italia in Eurōpā est; Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt", which is supposed to make you realize that sunt 'are' is the plural of est 'is'.
This list is to help non-native English learners? Many native English speakers might have trouble with a few of these: abeyance, abscission, accretion, amalgamate, anodyne, antediluvian, apposite, arabesque, atavism, and avuncular.
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.
From the linked website, the best words to learn for a learner are from the 1000 Most Common English Words section.
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There's a very good book for Latin that uses that trick. Goes from zero to extremely complex Latin. Whole book is in Latin, no translations. https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia... The only requirement is knowledge of orthographic alphabet and how each sound is produced. Latin, fortunately, has very simple sounds compared to English or Swedish. It took me about 2 years to go through both parts…
Is any book like that available for contemporary languages?
I went to an interesting talk once at the Boston Python meetup, where a guy figured out how to order sentences so could learn them in an order where you already knew the "other" words in the sentence. Basically, making a directed graph of vocabulary. He was doing it to learn Latin, but you could do it for any language.
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…
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Don't you have to have the translations at some point, or at least some side channel (i.e. an illustration that the phrase refers to), in order to "ground the symbols"?
I have this book and I can tell you that it does use illustrations quite a bit (although most vocabulary is ultimately probably defined using other words). The very first chapter presents a labeled map of the Mediterranean region and begins: "Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Eurōpā est. Graecia in Eurōpā est. Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. Hispānia quoque in Eurōpā est. Hispānia et Italia et Graecia in Eurōpā sunt. A…
Edit: Before anyone says it, in my original comment, that should have been an e.g. instead of an i.e.