Oulipo approach to language learning

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zenmonkey
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Jan 06, 2022 5:42 am

einzelne wrote:Anyways, I was just daydreaming.

Let's continue the daydream -- In the name of efficiency, we could rewrite great works and remove the useless repeats of prose.

I just ran Camus - L'Etranger through some Python programming.

Here are the 30 most frequently used words (having gotten rid of the stopwords*).

[('Raymond', 91), ('moment', 90), ('demandé', 88), ('bien', 81), ('rien', 77), ('Marie', 72), ('répondu', 65), ('temps', 61), ('fois', 58), ('été', 56), ('air', 53), ('avocat', 52), ('homme', 51), ('maman', 48), ('faire', 45), ('soleil', 43), ('femme', 42), ('jour', 41), ('chose', 39), ('sommes', 38), ('-il', 36), ('jamais', 36), ('pensé', 35), ('yeux', 35), ('voulait', 35), ('beaucoup', 34), ('petit', 33), ('visage', 33), ('fallait', 32), ('regardé', 32)]

He would only mention 'Raymond' once. Get rid of the repetitive melancholy of 'maman'. And his weak desire of 'Marie' and 'femme'. Such a lighter read we could have!

Alas - we'd use only once 'culotte' or 'brodée' but that is just like the original.

*probably needs a little more cleaning - that '-il' makes me think that the lemmatization function may need the '-' removed.
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby rdearman » Thu Jan 06, 2022 2:14 pm

Cool! I have now read Camus - L'Etranger, I should review it on Goodreads.
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby einzelne » Thu Jan 06, 2022 2:47 pm

reineke wrote:Balloon


I'm sorry but I'm not convinced. As every lexicographer knows, not all meanings are created equal, especially in the context of everyday conversations. You enumerated all registered meanings, including rare and technical ones. How often do you discuss balloon angioplasty with a barista while waiting for your coffee? Hell, I don't even know what it is called in my own native language!

For the sake of my Oulipo thought experiment, main meanings would be more that enough. And semantically, balloon is pretty transparent: a balloon, to balloon. Compare it, for instance, with: a home/to home in on something.
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Jan 06, 2022 2:59 pm

rdearman wrote:Cool! I have now read Camus - L'Etranger, I should review it on Goodreads.


If you haven't, you should. It's somehow haunting.
I think it's the last French physical book I read (2021).
There's a recent article on the NYT dealing with translation difficulties.
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Jan 06, 2022 2:59 pm

rdearman wrote:Cool! I have now read Camus - L'Etranger, I should review it on Goodreads.


If you haven't, you should. It's somehow haunting.
I think it's the last French physical book I read (2021).
There's a recent article on the NYT dealing with translation difficulties.
Last edited by zenmonkey on Thu Jan 06, 2022 3:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby rdearman » Thu Jan 06, 2022 3:12 pm

zenmonkey wrote:
rdearman wrote:Cool! I have now read Camus - L'Etranger, I should review it on Goodreads.


If you haven't, you should. It's somehow haunting.
I think it's the last French physical book I read (2021).
There's a recent article on the NYT dealing with translation difficulties.

Well, since you told me twice I probably should obey. ;)
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby reineke » Thu Jan 06, 2022 4:50 pm

einzelne wrote:
reineke wrote:Balloon


I'm sorry but I'm not convinced. As every lexicographer knows, not all meanings are created equal, especially in the context of everyday conversations. You enumerated all registered meanings, including rare and technical ones. How often do you discuss balloon angioplasty with a barista while waiting for your coffee? Hell, I don't even know what it is called in my own native language!

For the sake of my Oulipo thought experiment, main meanings would be more that enough. And semantically, balloon is pretty transparent: a balloon, to balloon. Compare it, for instance, with: a home/to home in on something.


Hmmm the thing is I'm throwing heaps of building material, we're not sure what we're building here and you're arguing about the texture of a single plank. My point was that it was difficult to agree what goes into this and how to connect it with collocations and following your train of thought I mentioned having a discussion with someone over at HTLAL about the usefulness children's literature and words like "balloon" which the person used as an example of kiddy words not worthy of knowing. I maintained that it was a useful word that's also used by adults and gave some examples and collocations. Your argument seems to be that not all the possible collocations need to be included in a book and you used a very narrow technical expression to prove your point. That's a deliberate exaggeration and a mute point because it should be obvious that it would be impossible to include to include all the words and collocations for all the words even if you concentrated only on highest frequency words and expressions. That's also part of the problem you're glossing over - many common words and expressions are not transparent and there's too many of them already. A balloon is a balloon you say. Easy peasy if you already speak English and are learning French. In Italian balloon is palloncino. If you don't learn this word well you may end up with balloncino, ballone, pallone... In Russian balloon (referring to the toy or generally speaking a balloon) is (шар)ик. However воздушный шар and баллон have their use too. We also have земной шар - globe, earth. In any case even to another slavic speaker it may not be obvious you're talking about a balloon (Cro: balon) unless the word is presented in a simple context like a children's story (preferably with images) or a cartoon. All that effort just to spare a single word that I thought most people would agree belongs in basic vocabulary.

Now you mentioned getting around 500 words per your favorite type of novel. Polars are kind of thin (I think) so I would say that's a considerable number of unknown words already or just about right for a dedicated student. I've already pointed out that your desired number of unknown words per 15 minutes of spoken text would bloat the book considerably. In order to cram 20k words in a short book using preapproved, useful vocabulary and clear sentences. That's an interesting thought. Is it possible that someone has already thought of that? Graded readers introduce around 400-500 words in a thin volume. The main problem is that they're boring and that there's a lack of advanced graded material. Also you need to inform us whether this book would serve as an extensive reading tool. Unfortunately looking at word frequency and text coverage data I linked above even with handpicked, high frequency desired words you would need to increase sentence complexity and create a series of books that read like Melville on crack to make a significant dent in your general text coverage at this level. Or we could just do a short story challenge. At all levels, assuming readers are learning through extensive reading, the words would need to occur several times which would further increase the bulk. If the learners are supposed to learn the vocabulary separately and through repeated readings and the book is just a collection of texts you're talking about a first reader or a sentence collection and you haven't addressed the problem of actual vocabulary acquisition.
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby luke » Thu Jan 06, 2022 5:52 pm

einzelne wrote:
reineke wrote:Balloon
Compare it, for instance, with: a home/to home in on something.

home run...

Sometimes the link between different word forms (sense .. insensitivity) or different meanings (home run = a run to home plate scored by the batter), become apparent after someone points it out to you.

Even "home plate" is not what one normally thinks of as a "plate". "Plate" by itself is quite flexible. Is it the flattish saucer, or what comes on it, or what comes on it AND with it, etc?

There's "license plate", etc., etc., etc.

We know vocabulary is complex.

I'm curious for more details on reinke's 50 books in Italian in a few weeks. Easy to imagine how it would be helpful. Curious more about the details. Were the books short or quite easy, based on your capabilities at the time?

P.S. I am the guy who asked, "how much do you put up with dreadful?" and some people give it 110%. :lol:
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby einzelne » Thu Jan 06, 2022 9:51 pm

luke wrote: Even "home plate" is not what one normally thinks of as a "plate". "Plate" by itself is quite flexible. Is it the flattish saucer, or what comes on it, or what comes on it AND with it, etc?


Notice again that, first, you also use high frequency words as an example and, second, you demonstrate how high frequency words behave in a very specific context (baseball terminology). It's a common problem with high frequency words.

I can tell you from my own reading experience that, although I come across certain idiomatic expressions, the majority of words are not such polysemic monsters. Here's a random list from the last French book I read:

congère, valdinguer, vallonné, frisquet, immondices, calciner, baraqué, moelle, rate, myrtille etc

30 words like that before I finally came across the first idiom the meaning of which couldn't be derived from its building words (although the context gave me some vague understanding of its meaning): se faire la belle — to escape. Notice that, again, it is built from high frequency words.
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Re: Oulipo approach to language learning

Postby einzelne » Thu Jan 06, 2022 10:39 pm

reineke wrote:Now you mentioned getting around 500 words per your favorite type of novel. Polars are kind of thin (I think) so I would say that's a considerable number of unknown words already or just about right for a dedicated student.


See my answer to luke above. To provide more specificity: the book in question is Musso's Sauve moi. It has 84k words. I highlighted 453 words, of which 75 were some weird technical words or some useful words I definitely met before but which for some reason refuse to get into my longterm memory (oh, those sneaky bastards!). So, what do we have? 400 words for 80k book. It's 99,5% comprehension! The audiobook is 9,5h btw.

In my answer to luke I mentioned specific words I highlighted. You can check yourself how many meanings they have. As a reader of general fiction like Musso, I don't have your balloon problem. It's simply not an issue.

Now, imagine an Oulipo write who has a specific task: build a narrative or a dialogue on the basis of these 400 words (Oulipo adores such kind of literary experiments). To make it more feasible, for each word we can allow to add 5 high frequency words (or repetions of the same new words). So in the end you would have 400x5=2000 words. Make a audio version of it and you get (2000/150) 13 minute audio-story which allows you to review these 400 words time and then (in contrast to the original 9,5h audiobook).

You can construct your own version Oulipo text. For instance, you can have only 50 new words per story and add more repetitions to demonstrate different meanings. So you would have a 10 minute story which mentions all these words 5-8 times in different contexts (because in real novels/stories such words are hapaxes).

Wouldn't it be wonderful?

I have a strong feeling that you don't understand the original problem to which my Oulipo utopia was a response. It's about effective tools for expanding and reviewing passive vocabulary at high-intermediate, advanced stages.

PS. I've read graded readers in have a dozen of European languages. Now way they introduced 400-500 new words per book. That's the problem with them.
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