Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#62How 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…
That's the geek inside you talking. But the hard part was the word stats. Now that you get 1K words, writing a thousand sentences manually to illustrate them is not really hard. It's a one day manual work. Less than the work needing to figure out automation, with way better results.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#63I 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.
don't Assimil courses work like that? not word by word but definitely builds up on common words to reach ever complex sentences
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#64Earlier 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…
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!
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is any book like that available for contemporary languages?
Check out https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazio... :)
This is a awesome resource, thanks a lot! Some of these books are of course quite old. For example I would not recommend trying to learning contemporary German using this [1] book. Reading 'fraktur' alone can be rather challenging …
[1] [Worman, J. H.: Erstes Deutsches Buch, nach der Natürlichen Methode, für Schule und Haus, American Book Company, New York 1880](https://vivariumnovum.it/edizioni/libri/dominio-pubblico/Wor...)
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#66This 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.
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 (or at least have heard or read the "other" one) so they can understand you alright, but I am told that if/once you are proficient enough in English, when you - mistakenly - use the latin based ones you sound like being snob or "upper class" or very formal (and wanting to seem so).
A few examples (of common words):
apartment=flat obscurity=darkness
arms=weapons
annually=yearly
legal=lawful
constructor=builder
transmit/transmitted=send/sent
custodian=keeper
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#67Earlier 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…
> use the latin based ones you sound like being snob or "upper class" or very formal (and wanting to seem so)
I'm guessing that distinction comes from the norman conquest, with the upper class speaking French with the latin version for 500 years and the lower class speaking a germanic version.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#68can you make a container that lets you crawl any other language?
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#69I 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.
I would be really interested in a German version of this.
I wanted to do more a less the same: a "translator" that translates a German text content into a german text but by replacing words you don't know (e.g. extracted from memrise) into words you know. That way you can start reading texts of your foreign language without looking at your dictionary every sentence.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#70This 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.
The goal (afaict) is not precisely conversational fluency, but rather an ability to pass the exams such as GRE and GMAT - inferred from the fact that the lists are mostly from "Barron's" guides for those exams.