Completely OT, but is there a mathematical explanation for why, when scrolled the spaces between the words appear to form connect channels?
I think you're referring to word rivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)).
Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
41–50 of 95 posts
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#42Very 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…
Thanks for your awesome feedback. And yes this is just the initial ground work and part of a larger experiment. We are also trying to teach English using Bollywood movies and GIFs[1]. I agree that human editing is very important and as such upvote/downvote button feature is in pipeline next. [1] https://buildmyvocab.com/ddlj.html
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Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#43I 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…
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 Track feature allows you to play a sentence for each unique missing word in order of difficulty like you described.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#44I've always thought that the Simple English article versions of Wikipedia were always useful for non-native English speakers. https://simple.wikipedia.org/ Most people seem to be unaware of this Wikipedia aspect.
Furthermore Simple English tends to be the very high level TL;DR version of associated article.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#45I 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.
Years ago I found a great example of this on the letter level for learning Cyrillic - takes only a couple minutes to run through and it's really satisfying:
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#46What about other languages?
I'm working on Chinese, and everything I do gets put into http://pingtype.github.io
This week I plan to finish making clips for words in movie subtitles.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#47Is there a word list for TOEFL and/or IELTS?
I'm using a similar strategy (movies, music, Bible, articles) for studying Chinese. I'm using the TOCFL and HSK word lists. My friend uses a book with a list of 15000 vocabulary words by Morris Hill. I can't find a txt version though.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#48Earlier 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…
Are you aware of something similar for Biblical Greek?
stefan - I'm building http://pingtype.github.io for studying Chinese, and reading the Bible every day to practice.
I already forked the code to make a version to help Chinese speakers learn English.
I thought about Biblical Greek & Hebrew & Aramaic & Latin, but I wasn't sure if there's a market. Evidently there is! The biggest challenge is making a good dictionary. If I write the code, could you help to fix the dictionary?
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm working on http://pingtype.github.io which also does word spacing, and literal translations.
Re: Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
#50Nicely done. You could add in a mailing list to send users a digest of new or top vocabulary words every week.
Second that - would also be interesting for English speakers learning a language like Chinese, where the average literate speaker can recognize about 5000 of the most frequently used characters.
galen - I'm making http://pingtype.github.io for learning Chinese! I don't think that studying characters is the most important thing though. Words are more important than individual characters! My program can help you type parts of a character, and put spaces between words automatically.