How to understand half of Harry Potter book in any language (+ source code)
blog.self.li
blog.self.li
That's what I've always said to my friends, but they insist on learning grammar, which of course they'll forget after a few hours/days. Three years ago I could hardly read anything non-technical in English, now I can understand Lolita - which is a hard novel to read for a non-native. All thanks to audiobooks.
I found that audiobooks are the most fantastic way of learning a new language... I couldn't have possibly read Lolita or Silmarillion before - They're just too hard for someone who is trying to learn a new language. Long sentences full of new/invented words - It's easy to lose the thread. But listening to a skillful reader reading them aloud, you can understand even the most complicated words and sentences just from the context, and the reader's tone and emphasize...
If you want to learn a new language, do yourself a favor and listen to some audiobooks. Pick a book you've already read in your native language (preferably more than once) and you'll be amazed how easy it is to understand and learn new words (you must have a basic understanding of that language of course).
It's true that grammar can be very complicated and will be easily forgotten without practice. A good practice is reading a book and trying to see not only if you can understand what is happening but also analyze each sentence and see if you can understand which grammar rules are used in its construction and why.
I understood "computer English" before just good enough to read documentation, tutorials, and play most games :), but I've had problems with complex sentences, idioms, etc. Now it's much better, and I'm reading a lot of English literature.
tl;dr: Applaud the idea, but it's misguided. You need to focus on understanding words in greater context to derive any meaning.
I'm Norwegian, so the old Danish translation gave me a "halfway house" - modern Danish is very understandable for a Norwegian; older Danish gets quite a bit closer to German. I still missed a lot of what was going on, but it brought me up a full grade in a semester.
Of course I'd probably had done just as well with less effort had I chosen something easier - I was being pretentious about it.
"Harry and to at to I to with Voldemort or what to and I do for, Hermoine!!"
This is like trying to learn a javascript and finding that in reality it's not that hard because half the language is open and close parens, semicolons, and the word "function". Fluent in javascript!
I remember there was an article about this a while back which concluded that using the words "you should follow me" gets the highest conversion of readers to twitter followers. This guy gets a front page post and is at 208 followers.
Maybe we can finally lay it to rest as yet another instance of the useless lifehacker circlejerk cargo cultist behavior and agree that the only thing that makes people follow your feed is good content? Please?
For example, the previous paragraph in Finnish: "Pitää myös muistaa, että kaikissa kielissä ei käytetä yhtä paljon prepositioita. Suomessa, esimerkiksi, muutamme yleensä sanan loppua preposition käyttämisen sijasta"
Example in Polish: "Policzyłyście długopisy?" means "Have you (more than one person, no males in the group) finished counting pens?"
If you started counting, but then something interrupted you, and there were some males in the group (and you feel it needs to be pointed out), you can just answer with
"Liczyliśmy", and the whole meaning is preserved :)
Even though you may know 95% of the [words] in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very [words] that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".
Of course, Chinese is a little hard (stroke order is harder than alphabetical, and you can't guess the meaning as easily like you can with a related language like German), but ... it's still a good way to go.
Of course, almost every language teacher on the planet will recommend you start with common words and pattens (grammer, phrases, etc), then learn less common stuff. It's not a revelation.
When I wanted to check every word, it quickly became a chore, and I've lost motivation to read further.
So I recommend this way of reading foreign literature - for me it was very effective.
(http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_ha...)
> He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
> "It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
In more detail, there's an assertion and a proposed solution - and nothing to even remotely back up the assertion? Show me a page of Harry Potter in Spanish translated in this manner - I somewhat doubt it will make much sense.
His post about this: http://www.linguatrek.com/blog/2010/12/harry-potter-the-book...
You can guess surprisingly big part of a book basing just on the context and a few words you already know. That's how kids learn their native language. It's a good method, it worked for many people (including me:)) and I don't understand why are you arguing it isn't.
I'm saying that this guy starts off OK, then goes on to devise some code to do that, then declares success apparently without running the code and reasoning about the output. He says that 50 words are 50% - but his script stops at 20? And of those, he lists ten, which are, as others have pointed out, grammar artefacts and stopwords - completely without consequence to getting to read the book in question.
I would love to try to put my grammar/flash cards aside and go the Harry Potter route.
I can't code. What could you do to help me, an average user, do this with Korean?
Korean is opaque, and though I have a book of the 6000 most used words in Korean, I don't find it very helpful when picking up a children's book, for example.
I guess there are many people who would benefit from this idea and, like you, can't code. It sounds like a good idea for an Internet service - a list of words to check before reading book X in language Y.
I think just go get copies of books you know well, or childrens books (harry potter, the little prince) and start reading with a dictionary or wordreference near by.
You could also pick up a frequency dictionary if you just want to build a base level of vocabulary.
I'll grant that Spanish is relatively easy but Russian is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn. It's hard for me to judge the difficulty of English but I wouldn't say it is an easy language.
Unfortunately there are only a few Linguality books. Can you do this with an e-reader?
I have been living in North America only 10 years - and I can't even teach Russian to my own kids - we had to get a tutor.