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Lingvist- new online learning programme | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 1 of 45 17 November 2014 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just found out about lingvist (https://lingvist.io/), which is a new competitor for the likes of Duolingo. It has opened for "international public beta", and those who sign up this week get a "free VIP subscription" (whatever that means) for a year.
At the moment, they are only testing for French, but they plan to add other languages such as German and Japanese sometime in 2015. The creator was a physicist at CERN, and decided he wanted to learn French in the most efficient way possible. Being mathematical, that means he used statistical analysis to determine the most common words and worked from there. In other words, the course is based around frequency analysis, which could be a good thing. But I think that claims of efficiency based solely on teaching the most frequent words is exaggerating. So what is it actually like in use? The main page, called "memorize", looks slightly like Duolingo, but you only ever have to type in a single word: 
If you type the word correctly, it says it, and then gives you a new sentence. If you get it wrong, it gives you the correct word in the box, but you still have to type it in again until you get it right. The other two main areas are reading and listening. It looks like all readings have audio, and all listening passages have text (EDIT: audio for readings is still in development). Texts range from a few sentences to around 50 pages, and they tell you what % of the words are known by you (based on words you've learnt in "memorize"). I think it is this feature which will really make this a winning course. You can choose passages based on genre and based on the fact that you know a sufficient amount of the vocabulary. 
The other really cool feature is the statistics page, which tells you things like how long you've been studying, how many words you've learned. 
Below this is a standard graph which shows how much text is covered by x number of words known. What is neat about this is that it shows where you are on the chart. Another cool thing is that it has a text in French to the right, and all the words you know are in green, so you can see in reality how well you have an "average" text covered. 
My initial impression is that this is going to be a useful course, but their claims for it being the most efficient method ever are exaggerated. EDIT: a further reflection is that they have tackled dealing with texts better than Duolingo. However, the fact that you don't type full sentences might give Duolingo the edge for practicing output. Edited by Jeffers on 17 November 2014 at 7:32pm 16 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 45 22 November 2014 at 2:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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I thought I'd spend a few minutes checking it out last night ... and ended up spending
closer to 40 minutes. That's a good sign. My initial take: Memorize: It looks like you have to start at the very beginning with this, and there's no way to fast forward. They recommend studying 150 words per day. I'm not sure how much time I'm willing to spend on this, or how many hours it would take to get past the real basic stuff. I like that you have to re-type words that you miss. The audio was a lot nicer than DuoLingo, which occasionally sounds like a robot. For my level in French, I prefer my own Anki decks. However, it would be great for my Italian, where I know the basics but haven't learned them to the point where they come naturally. Read: I have so many French books already; there was nothing here that really interested me. There's no pop-up dictionary or footnotes, so you either understand the reading or you don't. They will be adding audio soon to the readings, which would make it more intriguing. Listen: This section, however, looks fantastic. There are over 80 audio clips at the beginning level, 200 at the intermediate level, and four at the advanced level. There are dialogues, jokes, literature selections, and radio shows. I've tried reading scripts while I listen to RFI and tv shows, and I've always found it to be super helpful. But it's also a bit of a pain and I don't do it as much as I like. Lingvist makes it easy. The audio quality is good, and you can scroll along easily as you listen. Trying to understand casual, spoken French is challenging. This is the section that will keep me coming back. Overall Verdict: I like the site. I think it's probably best for A2 or above; it doesn't attempt to teach grammar. It works much better on a computer than on a mobile device. DuoLingo is more fun for the beginner, but DuoLingo also punishes you if you skip sessions by making you repeat sentences like "the butterfly drinks milk" and "the turtle doesn't like cookies" over and over. I hope Lingvist doesn't do that. Thanks for the link, Jeffers! 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 3 of 45 22 November 2014 at 9:12am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, if you click on any word in the reading section you get a dictionary definition, and it says the word. It gives a bit more information on verbs. You can do the same with the transcripts for the listening section. It isn't obvious, and I discovered it by accident.
Yes, I think Duolingo is more "addictive", because gaining points is strangely attractive. If you miss a word on lingvist, you will get it again soon in the exact same sentence a few times. That sounds like a bad thing, but I think it makes it easier to manage. With Duolingo, I found I would miss a word, and when it gave it to me in a completely different sentence I would miss it again. I liked the gamified aspect of Duolingo, but in the end the fact that you get no credit for getting 90% of a way through a lesson and losing your last heart is what makes it frustrating. Lingvist doesn't have that frustration factor. I've used it now for about 1.5 hours total, and I think I will continue using it a bit most days. I've now "learned" 437 words, but only a couple were words I didn't know before. One of the odd things is that you get conditional words like "serait" and "devrait" quite early on, in fact you get some conditionals of avoir before you get "avoir". This is obviously because it is built on statistics. Overall, I am impressed with this programme, and I am more likely to stick with it than I have been with Duolingo. For me, this type of course will always be a supplementary course, but the readings and audio sections will mean it's a supplement I will probably keep coming back to. Edited by Jeffers on 22 November 2014 at 9:27am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 4 of 45 22 November 2014 at 10:38am | IP Logged | |||||
There are grammatical explanations. They appear below the memorize section when you make a mistake. For verbs, they usually give full tables. I just typed "doit" when I should have typed "faut", and got the following notes:
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 5 of 45 23 November 2014 at 7:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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I must have clumsy fingers. I kept getting the option to highlight text; it took awhile before I found the right
touch to get the dictionary. I've been having the same problem recently with kindle's popup dictionary.. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 6 of 45 23 November 2014 at 9:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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Je pense que c'est bon, mais...
I was surprised to find the Garcon audio in the easy category. Looking just a bit further, the difficulty of audio seems to have a strong correlation with the duration. I see Le Petit Poucet, which I listen/read at the airport some time back in the advanced category. It's a children's story. I definitely like the site as a different study modality. It's been good so far just laying in bed when I'm winding down or in the morning when I can't sleep. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5865 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 7 of 45 23 November 2014 at 10:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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It looks like there will also be an option to upload your own texts. Though it doesn't seem like reading texts or listening to dialogs factors into the other parts of the site yet (for example, counting as a review of a word or letting you mark words as known).
I'll follow along a while to see where it goes. They claim that it will take you to B2/6,000 words. Also, at least for me the next word loads a bit slowly (several seconds). I've missed a few words after pressing enter a second or third time thinking the first one didn't go through. And they just asked me to read a text, though all the texts still say 0% words known. And i can't find the stats page. Clicking on Dashboard doesn't do anything for me. (EDIT: It must be because it uses some Google stuff which is blocked in China) It does look like there's quite a bit of data though, i like how it gives you information on a word when you get it wrong and all the data on verbs. Edited by Crush on 23 November 2014 at 10:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 8 of 45 24 November 2014 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The dashboard says I've learned 658 words in 3 hours. Tomorrow will be day four. Will the site will pull an Anki day four on me and start reviewing words I got right from the start? That would be a very cruel trick.
On the upside, I have learnt a few words and noted some spellings. I've liked so far that it re-asks about the words I missed on the first go around. I'm wondering how the algorithm is on those. During a long session, they popped up for review more than once it seemed, even if I got them correct earlier. Anyway, the site is addicting, but it's taking time away from French in Action. Mireille will be jealous! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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