Alleray raised a good point. Now we can import lists of words and see how many words we know or do not know. These lists can be the 2000 most frequent words or a TOEIC or TOEFL list or the equivalent in another language.
Are many people interested in doing this? If so, how do we make people aware of the usefulness of doing this. We could put lists in our libraries but then someone would have to record the words.
We could put content in the library that talks about the usefulness of lists, and then in the comment to the content item, list some of these lists. A German speaker could do it for German, a French speaker for French etc.
When I was learning Ancient Greek I used a 1000-most-common-word list to test myself against until I knew them, as once you know the words from such lists (specially a 2000 word list) you’re well on your way to fluency.
If such lists were uploaded here at LingQ (with or without an audio component), I would definitely make use of them as an aid in judging progress for my target language(s)!
Ocius, at present we are only able to share content that has both sound and text. Nothing prevents you from importing lists for your own use. However, in order to make more people aware of these lists and where they are to be found, what should we do?
In that case, your last idea would seem best. Along those lines, one could have the first part of a LingQ lesson be a short description (in the target language) of the value and usage of such lists including a recording, with the full list itself also in the text upload, but not spoken in the recording.
Ocius, that is what I was thinking. Then the lists could be added in the notes and comments where links might work. I will have to give this a try. The problem is would many people find these?
It would be better if people studied these lists of words in context…it’s very difficult to learn a new word outside of context. Maybe people could create sentences with these words.
I use word lists. It has the advantage for Russian that the words are in the dictionary form for lingQing. It’s harder to learn a word when you have lingQed the instrumental plural form.
I would have recorded some audio and uploaded some English lists already, but I wasn’t sure about permissions.
Maybe it’s not that usefull those lists to know the meaning of the words but I think it can be good to practise the pronunciation.
Maybe we could do the lists with a context. Like a list of words for verbs, another one for objets from a house, another one from parts of the body, anothe one for animals… etc. I think that would be interesting and useful to see how many words we know from diferent topics.
It’d be nice if those lists were the same in all the languages, for people who are learning more than one language. And that would be also helpful so you can download that very same list in your own language and see the meaning without going to the dictionary, or make it easier to know the meaning because you already studied it in another language.
If we are going to do it for all the languages I’d be happy to help in spanish and record them.
What I had in mind with lists is more in line with what Alleray mentioned on another thread. I will try to attract him here.
I am referring to long lists, from 500 to 2,000 words or so long (most frequent words, Academic Word List in English, TOEIC word list, list of business terms etc.)
The advantages, for an intermediate learner are as follows.
You can immediately see which words you do not yet know (at least on LingQ)
You can look these words up and convert them to yellow words.
Yes JannaM we learn best from context. We will not “learn” these words by just LingQing them. However, we are going to increase the number of yellow words we have on subsequent texts, so we will start to see them in different contexts and start learning them.
We can return to these lists from time to time to see how many have turned to status 4 “known” and are now only underlined and not highlighted in yellow.
berta, we could do this for lists of verbs or objects in a house etc. and have parallel lists in different languages. That is another concept and an interesting one. I am not sure that it is worth the effort to record just the words. I think that it would be better to have a story on a house, or a lesson on the use of verbs in Spanish, with recording, and then attach a list or a few lists, or the URL of a site with many Spanish verbs in the Notes to the lesson.
I have just seen your comment. The list I imported to try this out is the Academic Word List with sublists of word families (more than 3000 words in all, 570 word families). You can have a look here: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/Averil-Coxhead/awl/
The shorter ‘headword’ list and the ‘most frequent words in the sublists’ are the next ones I’d like to try out.
For I short list of 500 words/phrases that are grouped by ‘domain’ I’ve gone back to a document I saved a while ago: http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/500words.htm
(502 Words that Can Be Learned with Total Physical Response (TPR), By Domain
Compiled by Reid Wilson)
Well, anyone can import such a list or lists an their own if they want to use them, for me they don’t necessarily have to have audio; they would just be for reference. Maybe you could provide a link e.g. on the home page.
Recently I tried out Paul Nation’s software for ‘Frequency’ and ‘Range’ counts: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx
The simple software can be downloaded for free and comes with ‘baseword’ lists of 1,000 families each, based on huge corpuses (up to 16 lists based on the British National Corpus).
One could process a large number of texts in different languages using this software and then come up with a list/lists to be used in LingQ. The texts have to be in text format (.txt). I’ll see what I can do for German.
Helen, often when I LingQ a word in Russian, copy the infinitive, imprefective or perfective, or the Nominative singular and gender of the noun into my Hint.
When reading texts I find it useful to see the different forms of words, in Russian the nouns, in Portuguese the verbs, since there are usually soe forms of the words that are more internalized in my brain than others/.