Comparing language portfolios (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Comparing language portfolios
Tags: CEFR Language Levels \| Fluency
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

daegga
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Austria
lang-8.com/553301
Joined 4523 days ago
1076 posts - 1792 votes

Speaks: German*, English^C2, Swedish, Norwegian
Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic

Message 17 of 18

18 April 2015 at 2:54pm | IP Logged

It's hard to use when you can't enter active and passive abilities separately.
Even if you would just average the values or calculate two separate scores it would be
an
improvement.

edit:
of course I could enter it as two separate profiles already, like so
passive:
http://lingvometer.com/portfolio/deuC2engC2norC1sweB2danB2fi nA1fraA2islA2
active:
http://lingvometer.com/portfolio/deuC2engC1norB2sweB2danB1fr aA1

but it's bad for comparison if everybody does it differently

Edited by daegga on 18 April 2015 at 3:02pm
2 persons have voted this message useful

robarb
Nonaglot
Senior Member
United States
languagenpluson
Joined 5061 days ago
361 posts - 921 votes

Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French
Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew

Message 18 of 18

18 April 2015 at 6:08pm | IP Logged

litovec wrote:

robarb wrote:

So I ended up scoring 2.83. Seems low

It's a lot! If you take an average citizen of a multilingual country, they have a LQ below 2. You could also find
authors of the books of the kind "Learn N languages in M hours" that are below that.

I meant, it seems low relative to the equivalents-of-learning-Mandarin-from-scratch that I feel like I've put into
language learning. But that's a fallible intuition. I agree it's quite high for a person in general, as it should be for
anyone when a measure of achievement is applied to their major hobby.

litovec wrote:

robarb wrote:

Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian are treated as three nodes
underneath Western South Slavic. But in reality, Serbian and Croatian could be grouped
together in a subfamily

It's true, I see it, however, as a minor issue. It has little impact on the score since the level of the subfamily is
already deep enough. Moreover, if you add together one of the three with something outside Western South
Slavic, it has no effect.

Yeah, in that example it's just arguing over pennies. But what about the case where a speaker of European
languages can learn either Indonesian or Arabic and get the same credit for either? Then one gets no difference
in LQ for what seems to be a substantial difference in the amount of study required. But maybe that's okay. If it's
not intended to reflect the amount of knowledge one has, but rather the number of truly separate language
equivalent one knows, then it's the right thing to do.

Serpent wrote:

I mostly mean what you get for free when you actually learn the language. So if it had actually taken me the
same effort to understand Romanian as Portuguese (which was my first modern Romance language), I'd have
listed it as B1, but since my active skills are low and I got the passive ones through the Romance languages and
Russian, I opted for A2. So kinda the opposite of what you thought. I already subtract a bit while entering, and
then you subtract more. Basically, to me it's strange to take into account related languages but not the
passive/active levels. And nobody is truly A1 without prior study/exposure, so while the effort may be minimal,
it's still needed (and A1 isn't that hard even in an unrelated language).

I think the key thing here is that the "free lunch" effect is much stronger for passive than active skills. So if
someone's comprehension of a third Romance language is at B2 level, but their active skills are at A1, you should
credit them with essentially nothing. But if their passive and active skills are at A2-B1, you should give them a
moderate amount of points. When you treat proficiency as a single number you can never quite account for the
fact that a person's distribution of skills in a language means their knowledge of that language may have a
different relationship to their knowledge of other languages.

So if you calculate your score in both "active" mode and "passive" mode, the same-family penalty should probably
be larger in passive mode.

Then again, the number is approximate anyway. Unless your active/passive skills are grossly imbalanced you can
just sort of average them and you should be close, right? And your averaging method can adjust a bit for whether
you, personally, think active or passive skills are more important for counting how many language equivalents
you know.

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