
Show HN: Lingvist – learn a language in 200 hours - jitnut
http://www.lingvist.io
======
wodenokoto
"Lingvist was founded by people who helped discover the Higgs boson at CERN as
well as the people who built the core technology at Skype"

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.

~~~
syllogism
Duolingo sucks though. So does Memrise. And you can build an anki deck, sure —
but not all decks are created equal. If you don't make a frequency list from a
large corpus, your Anki deck sucks too.

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.

~~~
wodenokoto
Interesting point. As I noted elsewhere, I do agree that there is room for
improvements in this space. I admit that my post is mostly fuelled by being
annoyed with their marketing copy.

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.

~~~
syllogism
Newspapers are likely a bad choice, yes. I've thought about this a bit.
Subtitles seem good, and there are corpora of casual speech.

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.

------
ColinWright
If it had Norwegian I'd sign up and pay real money.

~~~
luxpir
Suppose you saw they had Swedish coming soon. Lots of mutual intelligibility
there. Or is Norwegian a hard requirement?

I say this as an English speaker who learned Swedish and now does OK with
Norwegian after a little tuning.

~~~
ColinWright
Thanks for the reply ...

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.

~~~
luxpir
Now I'm curious! Although really just any chance to have a quick language
discussion...

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.

\--

[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.

~~~
ColinWright
Long story. It's inessential, but I'd really like to have enough for a
particular event. Details by email if you are interested.

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.

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MartinMcGirk
This is great. I keep telling myself that I'll learn Spanish. Something rapid
fire like this but for Spanish would be so damned useful.

