
Hacking language learning - Void_
http://blog.rinik.net/hacking-language
======
_feda_
The idea of 'hacking language learning' puts me in mind of Kato Lomb [1] a
hungarian linguist who worked for the UN as one of the world's first
simultaneous translators and knew around a dozen languages fluently. One of
the most interesting things about her is that she didn't take any interest in
languages before her adult life had begun; before that she was a physicist.

In one of her books she advocates reading foreign language texts without using
a dictionary at all, just trying to figure out the meaning from what little
you already know (of course you have to be at a certain level to even try
this, although you'd be surprised how little you need to know to start.)

This process forces you to think logically about who words are constructed,
and to use your own current knowledge to e figure out meanings of words. For
example, you might already know a small part of a compound word in german, and
use this along with the context of the sentence to figure out the meaning of
the whole word.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb>

------
tokenadult
This seems to be based on the idea that learning a language is mostly about
learning words. That has not been my experience as a language learner. (As
disclosed in my HN user profile, I am a native speaker of English who learned
Chinese to the proficiency that I was able to work as a translator and as a
Chinese-English interpreter.)

Words in one language do not have a one-to-one mapping with words in any other
language. As the saying goes, "The map is not the territory." Each language
has its own peculiarities of dividing up the Universe of experience into
words, and especially each language has a different approach to arranging
words into sentences and longer utterances with grammar and syntax.

I know of a Web page that lists some language-learning resources, especially
useful for the case of learning one Indo-European language (like the blog post
author's native langauge) while already knowing another.

<http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html>

The best single bit of advice I can give for someone who wants to learn a
language thoroughly is to do a lot of what the blog post author is doing:
reading in the target language. The section "Suggestions for Study" in the
front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which
I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975 has great advice: "Fluency in
reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated
aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ"
(capitalization as in original).

祝你好運。(Good luck!)

AFTER EDIT: The comment posted by _feda_ before this comment was posted that
it is important to read target language text for meaning beyond one's current
reading level, using context rather than a dictionary to figure things out, is
correct. That has much to do with improving understanding of the second
language, just grappling with the language directly a lot, not always relying
on bilingual reference books.

~~~
decode
> This seems to be based on the idea that learning a language is mostly about
> learning words. That has not been my experience as a language learner.

My experience, as a native English speaker who has learned German as an adult,
is that different stages in language learning benefit from different kinds of
study. There have been times where memorizing grammar rules have been
enormously helpful to me, others where reading a lot is what I needed, and
still others where holes in my vocabulary were holding me back. After a
certain level of proficiency, the only new thing you encounter in the language
is unknown words and phrases, so it makes sense to focus on learning them.

> Words in one language do not have a one-to-one mapping with words in any
> other language.

As you have mainly studied non-European languages, this might be more true in
your experience than for those who are focusing on European languages. There
are certainly many words that map one-to-one between German and English,
especially in common usage.

What I like about the author's technique is that it seems like a smart way of
priming the pump for real and detailed learning: when he encounters a new word
in the text, he has a general idea of what it means from the definition, but
he can sharpen that meaning with the particulars of the context where he finds
it. Otherwise, he might get only the vaguest sense of what a word means from
context, or have no clue at all.

~~~
johnwatson11218
I want to add that vocab would have helped me much more than the hours and
hours of French verb drills I did in high school and university. I wish they
would thrown so much vocab at you in school that retaining even 70-80% would
be considered top notch.

------
creamyhorror
In a similar vein, here's a Python script which someone wrote that does a word
analysis on Chinese texts:

[http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34994-new-
too...](http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34994-new-tool-for-
vocabulary-extraction/)

It provides a breakdown of the words in the text, and even does lookups to
supply definitions and frequency in an external corpus, so you know how common
that word is in a broad range of texts. You can then take the output and paste
it into a spreadsheet program, and from there import it into an SRS flashcard
system like Anki for long-term memorization. Kind of a DIY solution but it's
pretty handy for serious learners of Chinese.

It's also available as a web frontend here, under the "Wordlist" link:

<http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/tools/>

With full end-to-end integration with Anki and a mobile e-reader, it would be
very powerful indeed.

(I should also mention that the mobile app Pleco has a reader component that
allows directly adding words from an ebook into its flashcard system, along
with high-quality definitions. Pleco's probably the fullest Chinese-learning
suite available on smartphones.)

edit: For mouseover definitions of Chinese and Japanese words in your browser,
there's the extremely useful Perapera-kun Firefox addon. It allows you to add
words to a wordlist which you can then export as a text file along with
definitions. Tada, more cards for your Anki deck.

~~~
polemic
Anki is awesome! I've been using it to learn Finnish (<http://ankisrs.net/>)

~~~
johnwatson11218
I like Anki as well but I had several issues running it on android. I got
through the issues on my phone but I still can't use it on my Nexus 7. Also, I
was looking at German vocab and some of the translations were in Spanish,
while all the rest were English.

------
raamdev
This reminds me of an excellent article on Wired called 'Want to Remember
Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm' [1] in which Piotr
Wozniak describes how he used the spacing effect to learn English, among other
things.

In 1985 (!) he wrote SuperMemo, a piece of software that utilized this spacing
effect:

"SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice
what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too
late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time
to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this
moment is different for every person and each bit of information."

The full article is a bit long but if you're interested in this stuff, it's
well worth the read.

SuperMemo seems to have fallen behind as far as software goes, but there are
great alternatives, like Anki [2] that use the same method.

1\.
[http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...](http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all)

2\. <http://ankisrs.net/>

~~~
bjustin
I'm using Anki to learn Japanese, but since I started from scratch, I'm
learning the words here first[0]. Start with a word from there, use an
English-<Language> dictionary[1] and Google Translate together to
disambiguate, then search on Google Images in <Language> to find an image of
the term. Searching in the target language double checks that you have the
correct term. After that, just practice in Anki.

The method I described is from a Lifehacker post earlier this year[2].

As an aside, Anki is excellent. In the past few months version 2.0, a new
version deserving of a major version number, was released for
Windows/Mac/Linux, and just recently for iOS. The corresponding Android
version is a little behind but I imagine it will be out soon too.

[0]
[http://www.towerofbabelfish.com/Tower_of_Babelfish/Base_Voca...](http://www.towerofbabelfish.com/Tower_of_Babelfish/Base_Vocabulary_List.html)
[1] <http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi> [2]
[http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-to-speak-four-
langua...](http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-to-speak-four-languages-in-
a-few-years-heres-how)

------
gliese1337
Neat! I sympathize, trying to read books in Russian. Tracking progress with
individual words reminds me of some of Michael Walmsley's work at the
University of Waikato:
[http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/genquery.php?linklevel=4&lin...](http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/genquery.php?linklevel=4&linklist=CS&linkname=PhD_Theses-0&linktype=report&listby=Researcher&lwhere=unique_record_id=156&children=Research)

His software actually picks things for you to read based on words that it
knows you still need to learn.

------
mixedbit
Once you have a database of words that you know, you could use it to help
select a next book to read (a book that does not have too large percentage of
words that you don't know). Several times I bought a book only to find out
that the language is way to advanced for my level. Very frustrating.

------
klochner
Not to steal your thunder, but this is a pretty amazing story that may inspire
your own tool creation:

[http://www.salon.com/2012/10/27/whats_the_secret_to_learning...](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/27/whats_the_secret_to_learning_a_second_lanuage/)

~~~
gknoy
Spaced repetition seems pretty powerful. It seems like doing this while
reading a book might be more repetitive than spaced repetition techniques
recommend, but on the other hand you also have ongoing repetition of some of
the more common words as you read the chapter. Thanks for the interesting
article!

~~~
goldfeld
I think Spaced Repetition is precisely a tool, in the context of languages,
for the words you don't get enough or constant enough contact through reading,
writing, listening and speaking. For words that you do, you don't really need
it since you'll memorize it from actual use/need.

------
abecedarius
Very cool!

At <https://github.com/darius/spaced-out> I tried to do something vaguely
similar: from an aligned parallel corpus, automatically make a prioritized
spaced-repetition deck for language learning. (I think I used Europarl.) So
you get examples of the words in context, plus they're sorted with the most
frequent ones first.

(There's also an SM2-based flashcard reviewer in Python. It's all very crude;
I decided I didn't want to learn Swedish enough.)

------
karmel
This is being done, not with books, but with news stories, which for me is one
step up from books-- I'm reading all this stuff anyways, may as well do it in
Spanish... Only in Spanish-English right now, but the in-line translation is
pretty good: <http://www.nulu.com/>

~~~
avaku
Thanks for the link, it's great! I see they are using the spacing algo in
their flashcards...

------
_feda_
I think the idea of the database that knows what words you know is kind of a
fascinating idea in a way, in that it goes beyond personal information into
personal knowledge, a digital reflection of your actual understanding which
corrects itself continuously to reflect it more accurately.

Anyway, if this was a service I could actually use online, I most definitely
would, and I might even pay for it (as I once did with smart.fm which became
paid for a year or two ago). I'm currently learning german quite intensively,
and anything that makes this highly laborious process (that of cramming new
knowledge into my mind and trying to make it stick) more efficient is
extremely useful to any language learner.

------
biscarch
Quick tip for anyone learning foreign words on memrise or anywhere you need to
type with a different keyboard layout for OSX.

System Preferences -> Language and Text -> Input Sources. Select the languages
you want in the list. click "Keyboard Shortcuts" and enable whatever keyboard
shortcut you desire to swap layouts.

ex: now I can press CMD+Space to switch keyboard layouts between Russian,
French and Spanish.

------
mikesmullin2
memrise.com does this. at least for mandarin chinese. i've been enjoying it.

~~~
Void_
Looks cool. I think also Quizlet.com deserves to be mentioned here -- helped
me so much during high school.

~~~
fusiongyro
Quizlet sucks. It's all fun and games until some assholes come along and start
tagging their worthless sets with tags you're following. "The Trolls of
Quizlet", really? This crap doesn't happen on Memrise, and the Memrise
interface is not set up to make it terribly rewarding for people to try it.

------
toonsend
I would highly recommend
[http://www.silinternational.com/lingualinks/LANGUAGELEARNING...](http://www.silinternational.com/lingualinks/LANGUAGELEARNING/BooksBackInPrint/SuccessWithForeignLanguages/success.pdf)

Interviews with successful language learners gives a great set of language
learning techniques and methodologies.

------
TeMPOraL
> The code is a mess, so I'll keep it to myself for now

:(.

It's not always about looking at code; some people could benefit from OP's
solution right now.

~~~
sartakdotorg
I've been developing a similar system for accelerating my Japanese study, and
I haven't been able to release it yet either. It has nothing to do with the
quality of the code, it's that right now it's designed specifically for
myself. It practically hardcodes my username and other details like that.
Maybe other programmers could use it, but preparing such a package for general
consumption takes lots more time and energy.

~~~
evoxed
Same situation here as well. I started with eventual distribution in mind (yet
another Japanese study app) but it's still a long way away from being what I'd
consider releasable. Too many features coded in that I forced myself to try
out and will eventually be modified, reconfigured, or whatever. I'll run out
of excuses soon enough ;)

------
netvarun
Off-topic: It's interesting that word 'countenance' appeared at the top in his
screenshoot. That's the only word I still remember from my word-memorization
spree while prepping for the GRE.

For those wondering: It mean's face (as in a person's face or like the 'face'
in facebook. Countenance-book anybody? :)

------
ZeroGravitas
I tried something similar with the text of classic video games (I speak
English, learning French), since things like Zelda often use archaic terms. It
worked quite well, even if you can only get text from other games in the
series rather than the one you're playing.

------
welebrity
Nice work. For almost all learning, there is a better solution out there . . .
it just takes individuals to go after a creative solution using their brain .
. . which is really language/dialect independent! Bravo.

------
jfaucett
nice app! I built myself a little cli program that would do some of the same
things a while back, this definately has a much prettier interface though :)
Also this has a learning adventure which is a good additional touch, I just
used a feedback loop on my previous choices and what I had previously marked
as "unsure".

I usually ended up being too lazy though to actually use it. I know exactly
what your talking about though with conversation vs. literary I use german
every day at work but still don't get half of what Thomas Mann or Goethe or
trying to say.

~~~
sentenza
It is funny that many people seem to have this idea at the same time. Must be
that the time has come for this.

A while back I wrote a bunch of python scripts that do the same thing for
subtitles for myself.

Regarding your problem with Goethe and Mann: Maybe you shouldn't try to start
with "the masters". I read books in various languages and have come to the
conclusion that after a hard day at work I just can't read a nobel prize
winner in a foreign language. What I can read, however, is a crime novel, or
something funny (Maybe even a comic book).

Here is a book that I would recommend for you to read if you want to read an
important, well-known but easy german novel:

"Der Schatz im Silbersee" by Karl May: This is an escapist western written in
the 19th century and actually one of the most read German novels of all times.
Rest assured that every famous German you know (including Einstein and the bad
one with the ridiculous beard) have read this in their youth.

~~~
jfaucett
you hit it right on the money with the nobel prize winners :) I have to
(guiltily) admit reading a krimi or bestseller is fun, you know the words,
you're done after a couple train rides, it was usually exiting - of course
then you forget it, because the contents where basically nothing. I have liked
max frisch though and Kafka is also surprisingly easy when you consider people
study him, also thanks for karl may suggestion I'll put it on my to read list.
The thing is sometimes you want something to think about and I know there's
many great german authors and I'd like to be able to "get" them like I do
Borges :)

------
euoia
Here's a tool that I wrote for practising French verb conjugation that also
uses Mac OS X speech synthesis. <https://github.com/euoia/ReVerb>

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perlgeek
This is great, because it integrates learning with something that you want to
do anyway (reading), thus making it easier to come up with the motivation for
learning.

------
kentosi
Just a quick hint for anyone learning French: The Kindle reader comes with an
inbuilt French dictionary. Hovering over a word will show its definition (in
French).

------
teyc
Are there libraries that can turn voice into phonemes? It would be cool if I
had to say a phrase and the computer scored me on how close I got to it.

------
stream-media
Inspired by your idea, I created this web page: <http://vocabulate.me>

~~~
machinarium
Incredible. Thank you so much!

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itsnotvalid
Any thoughts on non-spaced language such as Japanese (which I am learning) and
Chinese (which I speak)?

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matthiasb
Brilliant! I believe this is how Rosetta Stone is teaching as well.

~~~
eric_bullington
No, but this is how Rosetta _should_ be teaching language. Instead they hawk
their "immersive" language learning. Immersion is great for children, but
adults learn differently (I say this as someone who learned a foreign language
as a child and two as an adult). It's not sexy, and it's not pretty, but to
build a foundation for learning a language as an adult, rote memorization of
vocabulary is by far the most effective route _in the beginning_. Once you
have a good base (say 500 of the most common words), you can start learning
grammar and then, slowly, starting to practice speaking, reading and writing.
But continuing to build up a vocabulary is vital to continuing to learn the
language. Once you reach about 1000 of the most common words, things will
start falling into place _if_ you have adequate exposure to the language. In
my opinion, it's only at this point that Rosetta Stone becomes worth using,
and then only if you don't have access to friends, family, or tv channels in
the language you're learning.

~~~
johnwatson11218
does anyone know the most common 500 words? Is it language neutral or does it
vary from language to language? I definitely agree that learning the 500 or so
most common words is a great start - even if some of the words are conjugated
verbs and you don't have the background to understand the conjugation.

~~~
ebiester
It varies from language to language, but those word lists are all around.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists> is a good place to
start.

I am not a believer in rote word memorization, but rather putting each word in
a sentence and using the sentence as the memorization route. Rote memorization
stores the word in a different part of the brain than the language center, and
using the sentence as the unit of flash card seems to override this.

I still see use for flash cards to re-trigger words in memory, but not for
actually learning new words. I can't tell you how much I struggled to de-link
certain words because I "memorized" them at the same time and so mixed up the
meanings of the two words.

------
aledalgrande
You can use the Collins API instead of that crappy synthesizer! ;)

------
xk_id
well done, man, well done. It warms my heart to see people who understood what
computers are for.

------
jalilos
it's a wonderfull idea to memorise some importants words

