I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the ideal from a Krashen viewpoint, is about 5% unknown. However, I think you can get a lot of benefit with much more unknown content, 20% for sure. But there’s not just unknown words, there’s also combinations of words with a specific meaning, such as les services de renseignement, or la benne à ordures where you might know the individual words, but not the composite meaning. And of course you might think you know a word, but it’s being used in a novel way.
I don’t think there is an easy answer to this one. I have a range of exercises. Each day I spend an hour listening to some content, and stop to check unknown words. If I stop too often, it spoils the flow, and I don’t gain much. So 5% unknown might be okay. I also spend an hour listening to content outside LingQ without checking unknown words, I just ignore them, or guess. So in that case unknown words are not an issue, unless they make it hard to understand the content.
And there is one case where a large percentage of unknown words is fine, and that’s when reading a transcript while listening to the audio, in order to train your brain to recognise the words i.e. pattern training. Thus in this exercise the meaning is secondary.
Don’t forget that even when hearing known words, you might be hearing them in new contexts, or in a metaphorical sense. Thus a plane might literally fly, and buns might metaphorically fly off the shelves.
So maybe it’s best to have a decent amount of input with ~5% unknown words, but you can include content with up to 20% unknown words if you have no choice.
Interesting. I appreciate your comments. You are realy banging the listening comprehension, which I find the most mysterious aspect of lanaguage learning. One can’t decide to listen better next time. It comes as it will and all you can do is keep listening.
I listen/repeat/shadow for about an hour/day on a Sentence View basis. I try to listen until I can hear most of the words in the sentence. I find hearing the words comes slowly even if I know the words.
Yes, Krashen is definitely a C+1 guy. But he was working on Comprehensible Input back in the early 80s. Has there been any research on C+n, particularly with tools like LingQ, which make it far more doable to “punch above one’s weight” in language learning?
I definitely couldn’t have gotten through Harry Potter with only a few months of French under my belt without LingQ. Whether that was an optimal choice at that point is another matter. However, over the course of a year, my C+n approach has worked well enough for me.
Now that I’m reading at an intermediate level, I’m taking another page from Krashen’s notebook. He noted a study which concluded that students who continued with the language they studied in school were those who reached the level of pleasure reading in their target language. So I’ve got a lineup of my favorite novels translated into French cued up.
Krashen probably uses different method of counting, total unknown words/total words whereas lingq uses total unique unknown words/total unique words. Those give completely different results in general. It seems that usually lingq method gives about 3 times higher percentage. Both methods have their pros and cons. Krashens becomes more accurate the longer the sample size is. Which would be logical for scientific method, but not very useful for short texts. Lingq on the other hand is more accurate when comparing shortish text about the same lenght, but would be more discouraging in long texts than they should be. Whichever way you count the results will be variable.
Nothing if they are single words, but once there are repetitions unique word count doesn’t increase as it’s only counting unique words. That’s why you get higher percentage as more common words repeat more often, but are only calculated once.
In German language schools, teachers teach “laddering up” approch i.e do not touch Novels unless you study all the grammar rules there in a language (Beyond B2 there are no grammar rules taught). Hence, they say pick materials based on your current level and increase your vocabulary and grammar knowledge gradually. If you are at B1 level, pick up Perfekt Deutsch magazine (that offers glossary also graded readers). In other words, do not pick up novels/books aimed at adults too early.
On LingQ 4 there was an option “full translation” where you could copy and paste translation of the chapter so that you could do parallel reading. This translation took away the difficulty of the text without disturbing the flow of the reading. I read a few books in German this way right from the go. Unfortunately this option is no longer there.
Even with this approach I had the urge to read easy materials and graded readers to pick up on grammar points by osmosis. If sentences are short, our subconscious mind absorbs them like a sponge.
In conclusion, both approaches will work in the long run. In other words, you have to read both easy and difficult reading materials.
With tools like Lingq I do not have to wait for tackling difficult books right from the set go that is a huge advantage. However, at some point, I need to read easy materials as well to guage how far my understanding in the new language has come along. Whatever your decision is, you have no option but to combine both easy and difficult reading materials.
In a few videos Steve Kaufmann pointed me at an old-school polyglot, Kató Lomb. who based her approach on interest:
…her favourite method was to obtain an original novel in a language completely unknown to her, whose topic she personally found interesting (a detective story, a love story, or even a technical description would do), and that was how she deciphered, unravelled the basics of the language: the essence of the grammar and the most important words. She didn’t let herself be set back by rare or complicated expressions: she skipped them, saying: what is important will sooner or later emerge again and will explain itself if necessary. (“It’s much more of a problem if the book becomes flavourless in our hands due to the many interruptions than not learning if the inspector watches the murderer from behind a blackthorn or a hawthorn.”) **
So we don’t really need to look up each and every word in the dictionary: it only spoils our mood from the joy of reading and discovering the texts. In any case, what we can remember is what we have figured out ourselves.
I think for every language learner the problem is finding input that is comprehensible at your level. That is much easier if you’re already C1: you can simply read or listen and pause for (or skip) the occasional unknown word. But the lower your level, the harder it is. If the target language isn’t similar to your own, it might take a lot of work just to reach the level where you can identify the set of sounds that are spoken.
The other problem is that most A-1 or A-2 level content is very boring. That is what “comprehensible input” seeks to avoid, right? I use English sub-titles to make things comprehensible before they actually are.
I think you’re absolutely right. Right now, with the right prompts, an AI can probably write stories using only the most common 2.000 words, or 5,000 words, and some AI systems can already talk to us in whatever language we desire. And AI is only in its infancy. In ten years, who knows how far this technology might advance.
It changes how the percentage is calculated. For example if you have a 30 word text that has 9 unique known words each 3 times with total of 27 and 3 unique unknown words one each, with Krashen you would calculate 3/30=0.1=10% and lingq 3/12=0.25=25%. On the other hand, if those 3 unknown words were just one unique unknown word repeated 3 times, then Krashens method would still get the same result and lingq would be 1/12=0.083=8,3%. These are just simplified examples. In reality results might be skewed in many ways between methods and also inside methods. With lingq you can basically repeat words without it affecting percentage. You could have a text that is 1000 words long and text that is million words long with both having total of 100 unknown words and both have same percentage with lingq.
Thank you. I know understand. It seems a bit odd, for me that sentence ony has one unknown word, bla, but yes I can see that one could count that word once, or multiple times.
I already said nothing when talking about single words. It is only one way of categorizing. It means that words are only calculated once no matter how many times they are repeated which affects how percantege is calculated.
gaoli said: the problem is finding input that is comprehensible at your level
That is true indeed. I pick up most of my books on eBay, inclusing German short stories, and linguistics text books. They are usually almost like new, and don’t look to have been read. The German A2 short story book I picked up on eBay is very good.
With French I was able to listen to input well above my level, as we share so many words, and the grammar is similar to English grammar. Thus one can get the gist of the input, and some of the details, even when the level is high. I suspect the same could be said for Spanish. I am not sure this is true with German, though I would be interested to hear other viewpoints.
Currently I’m reading, sans LingQ, two “French Bilingual Bridge” books: "Classic Science Fiction Stories " (Beginner) and “Classic Fairy Tales” (Intermediate) by Vallerie Wilson. Nice books, nice job.
I find the books pretty easy. It is refreshing not to be hacking my way through the jungle as I have with Harry Potter, Salinger, Hemingway, wikipedia, French newspaper and magazine articles.
So I haven’t taken the laddering approach. These Bridge books make me wonder if I might have been better off looking to bracket my reading for input closer to my comprehension.
OTOH, I read what I wanted to read, I enjoyed it in my way, and I did learn a fair amount of French. So I’m not sure of the trade-offs.
I might have made more progress with less effort using graded readers – if I could find ones that were also compelling. But I might have been so bored that would have slowed down my learning.
I also wonder if my exposure to more advanced language features will pay dividends later in my learning that I would have missed with laddering.
I like Steve K’s freewheeling attitude to find ways of learning that you enjoy and keeps you in the language.
When I started German on LingQ, I used the short stories and other material, and I think they. are too advanced for a beginner, even one with six months of German like me. I later imported YouTube videos which were simpler, and I feel I made more progress. German feels very alien. However, French shares a lot more vocabulary with English, and the word order is much closer, so I think it’s easier to understand higher level texts, and get some benefit.
But at the end of the day it’s not a race, enjoyment comes first. It’s very easy to be self critical, and miss the progress one is making. And just think of the poor people slaving away at Duolingo, making very slow progress.
I had a similar experience in Turkish. I tried the mini-stories last April and got frustrated and stopped. In August I found a couple of series of Turkish lessons, and after going through them (December?) I tried the mini-stories again, and they’re useful to me now.
I notice that if I scroll down from the mini-stories, LingQ has a bunch of simpler lessons in Turkish: several different series. Maybe those work for beginners.