Show HN: Lingvist – learn a language in 200 hours
lingvist.io
lingvist.io
Neither of which are skills that have anything to do with language. Not a single word about scientific testing of this audacious claim that you can learn a language in 200 hours.
At least Duolingo actually tested people against a regular college course and came out on top, so you have that to go on as a user.
They do specify what learn means - learn 3000 words. Is that recall? Recognition? Use in sentence? Actually understand in a sentence? In 200 hours?
I call bullshit.
If you look at the features page (how it works) you'll see that they claim to be the first electronic spaced repetition system ever in the entire world ever.
What about SuperMemo, Anki, Duolingo, Memrise, and hundreds of other SRS services and software?
Save your money, build an Anki deck or get in on Duolingo. Talk with a native speaker. Work your ass of. This is no silver bullet.
> build an Anki deck
This is a giant pain in the ass and the public decks generally seem to be low quality (and painfully out of sync with whatever else I'm studying). I'd happily pay Duolingo for an Anki (or equivalent) deck they match to their lessons.
Also, decks such as core2000 + dictionary of basic grammar + remember the kanji or kanji damage, will give all the highest quality content I've seen to learn Japanese. You will still need some guidance from a teacher, especially to get started, but no matter what you do for language learning, you will need more than one avenue.
The spoon fed Chinese deck is way better than Rosetta Stone.
But yes, there is room for curated content in this space, I just got really annoyed with the tone of the marketing text and went of on a bit of a rant. At least they didn't claim to make you learn like a baby :)
Your point is valid.
Because nothing says "monoculture" and "single language" like scientists from all over the world converging outside Geneva to build the world's biggest atom smasher!
Duolingo and Memrise seem to have the philosophy, "There are many words in the language you're learning. Here are some of them." This is really bad.
Because word frequencies follow a Zipfian distribution, if you learn the top 1,000 words in a language you're a long way forward. If you learn an arbitrary 1,000 sample of words in a 40,000 word vocabulary, you're much further back.
These guys seem to have this as their specific value proposation. I was going to do exactly this myself. I'm a computational linguist who's recently moved to Germany. I got about 2/3 of the way through the Duolingo course, but it's basically a waste of time. They taught me the words for "duck" and "ceiling" and "handyman" as part of the first 1,000 words in the course.
I think you need to be more careful about what are useful words. I remember my Japanese text book introduced the word for alien fairly early, and I thought it was stupid. Once I came to Japan, I realised if I had learned that word, I could say more funny things in my very limited conversations.
When I was studying in China, we were introduced to the word for diarrhea and how to describe the texture of our stool within the first 2 months. Hardly top 1.000 words, but if you've ever lived in China, you realise it can come quite in handy!
Frequency lists are often heavily influenced by newspapers and that is probably not representative of the things you will need in daily life or conversations. I have wondered if subtitles are more representative of normal conversations, and there are some research into building corpus from that, but I'm not really sure how you test the utility of your corpus.
I plan to heavily bias towards verbs. Nouns are much more long-tailed, and their frequency is "bursty" --- if the noun is relevant to the situation, it'll be used a lot. So you can get them when you need them. Otherwise you can always use a pronoun, or be vaguer.
I say this as an English speaker who learned Swedish and now does OK with Norwegian after a little tuning.
Norwegian is a hard requirement, and as it happens, quite difficult to satisfy. I'm doing the best I can with an odd mixture of techniques, and the time-line is short. Had Norsk been there it might have tipped the scales as to whether I succeed or not, hence my comment.
And I say this as someone who had rudimentary conversational Danish many years ago, and about 1000 words of Swedish about 10 years ago.
If that's the case it sounds like a good grammar book or two, plenty of daily audio exposure and flashcards ought to get you somewhere approaching what this service offers. I'd imagine you're well up on decent resources by now, though[0].
And I can only guess as to what your end goal is. Presenting to a tough crowd in Norwegian is all I can come up with.
A northern-Norwegian friend let on a little about the massive regional variations there, too, which makes it fun when someone from a 'non-standard' region replies in their own special, often ancient, brand of Norwegian.
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[0] - If you're stuck for new material, you can always try Lars Monsen's shows on nrk.no - a tough but kind outdoorsman - with the subs on.
I have references with grammar, and I have some vocab, but the problem is getting simple enough language in sufficiently good audio, given my time constraints. It's complicated.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T...
Good luck!
EDIT: Getting started - at first glance it's a useful addition to what I already have - thank you.
Thanks for the reference.
I got hooked playing with it for many hours. The speech synthesis for the course I'm taking (German) is pretty bad, and while using it I find myself spending an awful lot of time writing in English rather than German. Also it is messy in many ways (example: after the "Seasons" lesson I know how to spell Autumn and Summer, but not Winter or Spring).
Nevertheless I like it, the amount of material available is outstanding, so I guess I'll keep on using it for a long time.