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Strategy: Reading using a Word Counter | ||
Tags: Reading | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| xtremelingo Trilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6287 days ago 398 posts - 515 votes  Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Punjabi* Studies: German, French, Arabic (Written) | Message 1 of 8 04 October 2007 at 1:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is a strategy I employ using a word-counter. Thanks to Slucido, I am now using an even better word counter than previously.
STRATEGY: Use a word-frequency counter to determine which vocabulary words you need to learn in priority before you start reading specific reading material. Such as news articles for example. The strategy involves this. 1. Find a news website in your target language, or anything that you can read on an almost daily basis. I prefer international news simply because there are usually many references. 2. Use a word/frequency counter, such as the Hermetic Word Freq Counter (but any counter will do). Now what you are going to do is, find an article you plan to read. But do not read it yet, unless you are confident you can read it. 3. COPY and PASTE the article into WORDPAD, save it as a text file. 4. Input the textfile into Hermetic Word Frequency Counter or any counter of your choice. Let it rank the words by frequency. Now change the display format to (word + commas). Copy the list of words into WORDPAD (you can copy all of them, but I usually select the (top 30% and the bottom 30%). Now use the FIND > REPLACE feature and change ALL the ',' (commas) into PERIODS '.' Don't worry if you see words in the list you already know, just keep them there, most computer flashcard programs will remove duplicates anyways, if you are using hardcopy flashcards then just pay a little more attention. so you should have a list that looks kinda of like this, ranked by frequency. (simple words only used for example sake) example: dog, cat, apple, man, he, .... to N number of words etc into dog. cat. apple. man. he. .... to N number of words etc. 5. Use a free online translator, such as voila.fr, copy the new period-delimited list into voila.fr, and translate it into the language of your choice. It is necessary to convert to periods, because if you enter it as commas, it will try to treat the list as one huge sentence (and you will get odd translations), with periods in the list, it will treat each word as a seperate sentence (you want that). 6. Now you should have all those high frequency words translated into your native language as a period delimited list. Now copy the results into word pad as well and convert all periods back to commas (find, replace) so it is now a translated comma-delimited list. 7. Now import both comma delimited files (native and target), into EXCEL, so that you have a side-by-side native/target dictionary list. Save it. Use this to memorize or alternatively use this list and import it into a flashcard program. 8. Import into a flashcard program of your choice or on hard-copy flashcards. 9. Drill yourself on those words, memorize them. Now you should have all the essential words required to read that article effectively. The more often you do this, the easier it will become and your vocabulary will expand massively. 10. Read the article, and be amazed. :) Note: It may sound tedious at first, that is only because you are not used to the whole process. Once you get the hang of doing this, it is really quick. The whole process may take 10-15 minutes. You could read the article and with the dictionary look up words you encounter one-by-one, but you will be missing one very important thing -- it will be harder for you to tell which words have higher frequency and therefore you will not know how to organize/prioritize your vocabularly learning. Looking up one-by-one is actually much slower, particularly in large articles/reading material. This is why this method will speed this up for you. Some may wonder why I pick the top 30% and bottom 30%, This in total gives me 60% of the words in the article, ranked by TOP 30% in frequency and BOTTOM 30% in frequency. This way I only need to memorize 60% of the words, and expect to pick up the other 40% in context. You could adjust these percentages as you wish and with your progress. Edited by xtremelingo on 04 October 2007 at 1:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 8 04 October 2007 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I highly doubt the online translator will cope with something harder than dog, cat, apple, man.
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| xtremelingo Trilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6287 days ago 398 posts - 515 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Punjabi* Studies: German, French, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 8 04 October 2007 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, online translators can cope very well, if each word is represented individually instead of within a sentence. This is why using periods is important.
It will bulk translate all the words, like you would do looking them up in a dictionary one by one. Try it yourself. Enter in multiple words (ANY), seperated by periods and you will see. Edited by xtremelingo on 04 October 2007 at 1:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 8 04 October 2007 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I know it will translate them one by one, but non-basic words mostly have a lot of meanings and the online translator won't know which one is right in that context, and this is even without taking homonyms into account...
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| xtremelingo Trilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6287 days ago 398 posts - 515 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Punjabi* Studies: German, French, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 8 04 October 2007 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Serpent,
You are correct. However, this is where I let my 'reading from context' part kick in. I still learn the meaning the translator spits out first, memorize it, then read the article, the context will usually give rise to how the word is being used. It is still better to know the word than to not know it at all. Your logical reasoning skills will decipher how the word has been used. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6386 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 6 of 8 04 October 2007 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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So the most frequent words will be personal pronouns, articles, etc. Other words will be encountered once or twice
in the article. Oh, and did we mention that languages like French actually conjugate their verbs?! How does Hermetic deal with it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| xtremelingo Trilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6287 days ago 398 posts - 515 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Punjabi* Studies: German, French, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 8 05 October 2007 at 4:45am | IP Logged | ||
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furyou,
I generally ignore the personal pronouns, because they usually will always be the highest in frequency. I skip past those and go directly to the meat and begin my top 30% over there. It is in your discretion to choose whatever words you deem necessary in the end. As for verb conjugation. Don't worry too much about this. Just translate it as shown, memorize as shown and then read the article. When you read the article, the context will fix this up for you. The idea is to effectively read articles by memorizing it's highest and lowest frequency words first, then read the article for meaning, while not wasting time going through a dictionary looking up words one-by-one (since the batch translation will do this for you when the multiple words are seperated by periods) The more article words you memorize the easier the rest will be to pick out of context. DESIRABLE: Memorizing 95% of the words will make the last 5% very easy to pick up out of context. As for Hermetic. It appears to use some form of a merge/bubble sort algorithm, it is not 'intelligent' but it looks for identical words. For example in French the Verb Pouvoir (To be able to - present context) Je Peux Il Peut Heremetic will pick these up seperately, although they differ only in one letter. Remember it is up to you to manually discard these if you want. Personally I wouldn't, because if I already know what it means, then it really doesn't bother me all that much if they both appear in the flashcard drills. If anything it's just extended review. Edited by xtremelingo on 05 October 2007 at 4:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6386 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 8 of 8 05 October 2007 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||
So it does come out all screwed up, just as I thought. Thank you for clarifying, though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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