
Learning languages very quickly – with the help of some very basic Data Science - nns
https://hackernoon.com/learning-languages-very-quickly-with-the-help-of-some-very-basic-data-science-cdbf95288333
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x1798DE
Quite misleading. This is just an explanation of how he assembled a word list
to memorize - the top 1000 unique words used in two TV shows. Making word
lists is not even close to the hardest thing about learning a language
quickly, and 1000 words is not really a working vocabulary.

Additionally, this does not handle _most_ of the things you'll find annoying
about assembling word lists. Imagine doing the same thing with English -
you'll probably find "eat", "eating", "ate", "eaten", "buy", "bought",
"buying", "buys" all in the top N "words", but that's hugely redundant
information.

Another issue I've encountered when doing this sort of thing is that often you
get words that have multiple meanings, and without actually understanding the
context, you don't know which one is the common meaning, and most common words
are _hugely_ overloaded - you can't get a proper gestalt understanding of the
concepts represented by a word just from reading the (often complicated)
dictionary entry.

I'm very sympathetic to this kind of thing, since I've done similar things
many, many times, but I think the author way over-sells what's happening here,
and is likely to run into many problems with this in the future.

