I was wondering if any of you have imported a database of thousands of words and their definitions on LingQ. Or even only thousands of words without definition of those classical: 1000 more frequent words, 2000 more frequent words, and so on.
What would be the point?
The idea is to quickly spot what kind of most frequent words in a specific language I have not encountered yet. For example due to not rotating enough different types of material.
By importing, for example, the most 5000 most frequent words, LingQ would immediately know the ones I have still to do.
Then I could use the strategy to step by step take a bunch of those and ask ChatGPT to create a story to import to LingQ, and use it to learn them in context.
Just an idea to speed up some process.
Does it make sense? What do you think? How would you do it?
I did this for 150 lessons in the Introduction to Finnish course. Every single spoken word I made notes like this for. I also regularly export my LingQs and maintain a private database for queries.
It was time consuming and painful, but I’m very glad that I now have a strong foothold into the language. On most days I read comprehensively upwards of 30k words/day just reading subtitles on videos.
Although it was beneficial to do the initial grind, I don’t think I would do it again for a 3rd language. It is much easier to mind-numbingly absorb the information while watching videos with paired subtitles and just make odd LingQs for phrases as required.
When I first started on LingQ (As an absolute language learning novice 1 1/2 yrs ago) I thought this was the system for me. How many words could there possibly be in a language? I would just learn them all.
I’m a data guy, it makes me happy to look at lists of information but I think if you spend too much time going through long lists of words, doing srs review, anki cards till you throw up etc. you will just have a bad time (unless you’re into that sort of thing)
@roosterburton this was very interesting, thanks for sharing. However, you did this at the beginning of your journey rather than I was thinking at doing this at the “end”. Which means when we are already advanced on the language and most of those words are already within our knowledge.
It would be a sort of way to filling the gaps we have, and be sure that we have covered at least the most frequents words in our target language.
Plus, with chatgpt, we don’t really have to drill those words with flashcards but we can have context with stories. That would make it a lot easier to digest them and “complete” the gaps.
Looking at your example, it came to my mind that actually the importing should be done as a normal course. Just a list of the most frequent words, eventually followed by the definition or a phrase in the same language. No other languages involved.
In this way, LingQ would immediately gave us all the missing words in blue, and we can use them to build our stories.
If you think about it, all this could be automated already inside LingQ for each language and each user.
I’ve done this for my languages just to gauge how my known words compare to the top 50k or so most common words. Every few weeks I’ll see how many of those words become known and I can see how many I don’t know or haven’t even encountered. As a point of reference, for French I’ve read 1.2M words and have 24.2k known words on Lingq. Of the top 50k most used words, I know 15.5k, lingq’d 6.1k, and haven’t even encountered 26k.
Of all those numbers, I think the most surprising one is the 26k that I haven’t come across yet even after reading 1.2M words. I’m sure if I opened that 50k common words list and “read” through it, I would probably know a lot of those words, but it’s kind of cool to see how long it takes to discover them in the wild.
@aronald Wow, that’s a good test. The problem is that if we are not forcing ourselves to do that job, at some point we have the tendency to stay with the topics we like the most. In one way is a good thing because we enjoy the language, and actually use if for what we like, but on the other end we are missing a lot on increasing our average day-to-day comprehension on a bit everything.
Yes, I did this for Korean (the import vocab part, not the ChatGPT since I have no idea how/what/where to do that.)
I do mostly stick to things I’m likely to encounter in my actual usage of the language. My goal isn’t to learn the entire language, but just to be able to understand (and possibly speak to) current acquaintances regarding topics of mutual interest.