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Lingvist- new online learning programme

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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 7203 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 9 of 45
29 November 2014 at 3:36am | IP Logged 
I like the course a lot. I've put in just over 8 hours, according to the dashboard. 1466 words. Jeffers analysis
of the course seems very accuate. I've found the typing of the conditional and subjunctive and even present
tense verb endings has helped my spelling. I've noticed lots of things that don't sound different but are
spelled differentl, things like the faisait and faisais. I knew they were different, but hadn't picked up the
spelling rule until this course. It forces you to notice the proper spelling.

I also like that the blanks just fit the word and it has the helpful accented characters where they are needed.
This is helpful because it eliminates some possibilites and helps a lot with synonyms. I usually know when I
haven't got the word correct even before I hit <Enter> to have it checked.

As far as a "words learned per hour of study", the Lingvist is beating what I have done with Anki and a
frequency dictionary. Because of the nature of memory, it's not necessarily planting the words as deeply. I'm
only about 7 days into it, but it has been fun enough to put in all that time and I haven't felt that it to be boring.

I'm picking up a handful of words. A lot of them are colloquialisms like "gosse", which I had seen before and
"mec", which was in an Assimil lesson.   I also think the course is helpful in understanding French's complex
phonological system. I'm making more sound association between accent grave and acute accent.

I can see how doing 150 cards a day while the course is easy is helpful as a review.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4907 days ago

2151 posts - 3960 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

 
 Message 10 of 45
29 November 2014 at 10:23am | IP Logged 
That's great that you've found it so useful! About how long does it take you to do 150 cards? I agree it's great for learning the spelling of words you know (like monsieur). I'd love to know what it's like once it gets into unknown territory, or for anyone who's just starting out. Like you, I think it's very good for review, although I imagine it would be useless if you were beyond B1, or if you have all your forms down pat.

Luke, have you tried the reading and listening sections? I love the fact that it tells you how much of a text you should understand. I plan to use it more extensively once I get some texts/audio to 90%.

It is worth mentioning what lingvist means by a "word". For verbs, they clearly count individual forms separately, so venez, vient and venir are three different "words". Le, la and l' are also separate words, but I haven't noticed whether if they use the same principle for masculine and feminine adjectives. They even count qu' as separate to que. Some might prefer the headword approach (which I think Duolingo uses?) but I think this method is more useful to the student. The software doesn't think you know the conditional of devoir just because you know devoir and you've learnt conditionals. So when it says you know 87% of the words in a text, you're not going to scratch your head at words it says you know.

Edited by Jeffers on 29 November 2014 at 10:30am

1 person has voted this message useful



tristano
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Netherlands
Joined 4045 days ago

905 posts - 1262 votes 
Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English
Studies: Dutch

 
 Message 11 of 45
29 November 2014 at 12:27pm | IP Logged 
Why they do Estonian -> English and not English -> Estonian :(
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Gomorritis
Tetraglot
Groupie
Netherlands
Joined 4276 days ago

91 posts - 157 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English, Catalan, French
Studies: Greek, German, Dutch

 
 Message 12 of 45
29 November 2014 at 2:21pm | IP Logged 
Is it possible to skip to a higher level?
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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 7203 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 13 of 45
29 November 2014 at 8:17pm | IP Logged 
Jeffers wrote:
About how long does it take you to do 150 cards?


I just did the math. Going by what the site says, about 42 minutes.

Jeffers wrote:
I'd love to know what it's like once it gets into unknown territory, or for anyone who's just starting out.


My correct answers was 97-100% the first week. I'm not in unknown territory yet, but there are more challenging tenses and words showing up. Last night, I did a bunch of cards while watching TV and some when tired. My percent correct the last two days has been 94% and 90%.

The most challenging words for me are what I consider the unusual colloquialisms. I'm sure in many popular circles they are common. I just haven't seen them much.

Jeffers wrote:
Like you, I think it's very good for review, although I imagine it would be useless if you were beyond B1, or if you have all your forms down pat.


It's hard to know. We talk about levels like B1 as if everyone who is at that level is on the same level. That may be true to a certain degree, but the unevenness of skills between say writing and speaking and listening and reading may vary a good bit between students at the same level.

All that is a long way of saying that I think students up to B2 could probably still get benefit from the site.

Jeffers wrote:
Luke, have you tried the reading and listening sections? I love the fact that it tells you how much of a text you should understand. I plan to use it more extensively once I get some texts/audio to 90%.


I have read about 20-30 of the easiest shortest texts. I've also listened to about that many of the easiest dialogues. I've heard the dialogues/recordings on another free site. They've used a few informal words that were new to me.

I've been meaning to ask you about the percentage. I've yet to see any number other than 0% in the readings or listening sections. I've sorted in various directions and included easy/intermediate/advanced at certain points and I still only see 0%.

At first I thought it could be an iPad thing, but I see it from a PC running IE11 as well.

I'm hoping some of the words I think of as unusual in the reading/dialogue sections start showing up in the memorize section. Since I've spent over 95% of my time in the memorize section, it could be those words are out there in the dialogues and I just haven't got to them yet. For me, it is so much easier to remember a word when it's been used in a meaningful dialogue.

One up point about Lingvist is that all of the words are used in a sentence, which I like.

It's not really fair to compare my 4 month, 10 minutes a day experience with Anki with my 9 day experience with the Lingvist, but I will anyway:

Anki: 22 hours, about 1250 words under my belt (close to 2500 with both card sides).
Lingvist 8.5 hours with 1466 words words under my belt.

If the Lingvist were to continue to be about 3 times as efficient for word learning, I would say it totally rocks. The unknown for me is how much of the memorize vocabulary is reflected in the readings/recordings. If that is close to 100% and they are introduced in very similar order, then this will be a great site for me. They talk about 6000 words, right?


Jeffers wrote:
It is worth mentioning what lingvist means by a "word". For verbs, they clearly count individual forms separately, so venez, vient and venir are three different "words". Le, la and l' are also separate words, but I haven't noticed whether if they use the same principle for masculine and feminine adjectives. They even count qu' as separate to que. Some might prefer the headword approach (which I think Duolingo uses?) but I think this method is more useful to the student. The software doesn't think you know the conditional of devoir just because you know devoir and you've learnt conditionals. So when it says you know 87% of the words in a text, you're not going to scratch your head at words it says you know.


So, that's important info about how the 6000 words are calculated. You remind me of something else I think is pertinent in my personal Anki/Lingvist comparison. My Anki deck uses the infinitive as the main fact for a verb card. The Lingvist will throw the verb at you in various tenses and moods, so it really is covering something that Anki isn't.

Edited by luke on 29 November 2014 at 8:18pm

2 persons have voted this message useful



Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4907 days ago

2151 posts - 3960 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

 
 Message 14 of 45
29 November 2014 at 9:04pm | IP Logged 
luke wrote:
I've been meaning to ask you about the percentage. I've yet to see any number other than 0% in the readings or listening sections. I've sorted in various directions and included easy/intermediate/advanced at certain points and I still only see 0%.


That's strange. If you look at the 2nd screenie in my first post, it shows a % of known words. That screenie was taken when I just knew a couple hundred words, and it shows some of the harder readings on lingvist. Of course, it's impossible that you've used the site for a week and still only know 0% of the words in any text. If you're looking at the same page I show in the print screen, and seeing 0%, then you should report it. (How, I'm not exactly sure. I think there's an email address on their About Us page, or something like that. Send them a screenie so they know exactly what you're seeing.)

Gomorritis wrote:
Is it possible to skip to a higher level?

No option currently. But this is the Beta version, and it's only been out a couple of weeks. I'm sure they'll add something like that eventually.

tristano wrote:
Why they do Estonian -> English and not English -> Estonian :(

The international beta release is new, while they have had an Estonia-only beta for something like 6 months(?) Unsurprisingly, so far most of their users are Estonian, who would prefer to learn English than Estonian. They are an Estonian company, so hopefully they will give some priority to people wanting to learn their language.

Edited by Jeffers on 29 November 2014 at 9:10pm

1 person has voted this message useful



luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 7203 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 15 of 45
30 November 2014 at 12:54am | IP Logged 
Jeffers wrote:
luke wrote:
I've yet to see any number other than 0% in the readings or listening sections. I've sorted in various directions and included easy/intermediate/advanced at certain points and I still only see 0%.


That's strange. If you look at the 2nd screenie in my first post, it shows a % of known words. Of course, it's impossible that you've used the site for a week and still only know 0% of the words in any text


That could be.

What's odd is I've made my screen look like yours, as far as check boxes, etc. I notice your browser is IE. I've now tried IE, Firefox, and Chrome and it shows 0% on all browsers.

Looking at the page source, I see that JavaScript is disabled:

<p>It seems JavaScript is disabled in your browser.</p>
<p>Please <a href="http://www.enable-javascript.com/" target="_blank">enable Javascript</a> to use Lingvist.</p>

I think one of my anti-virus software packages has disabled javascript, since the normal methods of enabling it for IE and Firefox aren't making any difference.

1 person has voted this message useful



luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 7203 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 16 of 45
30 November 2014 at 2:15am | IP Logged 
Other observations.

Each session seems to start with a review of words I've missed. It covers those that were missed recently more thoroughly. In a long (say 60 minute) session, a sentence that was difficult the first time or two many pop up three more times even when I give a correct answer. I think this is good. This helps nail down those new odd words.

Similarly, when I started day 9, it had a bunch of review words, but they were all the ones I wanted to see again. I.E., it seems to know if I got a word correctly the first time, it doesn't have to show it again so soon. Words I have missed in the past come back up and they are covered first. So, today, I may have gone through seventy or more words before it ever showed me a new one. Once I got through them, then new words started coming in with a bit of review.

Today was a good day to sit at the computer and play with the Lingvist. I've put in over three hours and added 234 new words. 123 were review cards.   I did several different sessions. It's always pretty fun. No drudgery for me. Earlier in the day I looked at the dashboard and my percentage was about 89%. I took a nap before I started the current session. I'm back up to a daily average of 98%. This is the result of several things:
1) nap
2) learning
3) being more careful
4) noting subtleties, such as the word doesn't quite fit the blank, so it must not be correct. I ask myself, how would I think this word would be spelt in French. That process helps a lot.
5) There are some hints in the lower part of the screen. These may be other meanings of the word. Occasionally, this is a conjugation of a verb, which, although perhaps not related, may be exactly what I need to get the correct word.

Now, one could think this "make sure the word fits the blank" as kind of cheating, and I will grant you that, but it in that grand tradition of Cheating and Consolidation. I think that is especially apropos because emk led of with the byline:

Or How I Reached 99.8% Comprehension of (Some) French Fiction While Goofing Off

I do feel like my use of the Memorize part of Lingvist is goofing off.

Even though the memorize section has a computerized voice, I think Memorize is helpful for consolidating the complex rules of French pronunciation/orthography.


Edited by luke on 30 November 2014 at 2:27am



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