The Fluent Forever App

General discussion about learning languages
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby crush » Wed May 30, 2018 5:01 am

At least for the more popular FIGS languages (well, except maybe German) six months is a more reasonable estimate than most courses. Assimil also makes a similar claim, i believe. Not sure how effective (or interesting) the actual product will be, and yes six months is probably a bit optimistic, but on the Kickstart page i believe he mentions that for FSI's Category I languages you should expect to spend at least a year of active study on it (and up to two years for Category IV like CJK).
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby MacGyver » Wed May 30, 2018 5:09 am

crush wrote:At least for the more popular FIGS languages (well, except maybe German) six months is a more reasonable estimate than most courses. Assimil also makes a similar claim, i believe. Not sure how effective (or interesting) the actual product will be, and yes six months is probably a bit optimistic, but on the Kickstart page i believe he mentions that for FSI's Category I languages you should expect to spend at least a year of active study on it (and up to two years for Category IV like CJK).


I am very skeptical. A category 1 language is supposedly 600 hours of study time. Thats 3.3 hours a day everyday for 6 months. Achievable sure, but not very realistic if you are working, have a family or even just other time-suck hobbies.
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby crush » Thu May 31, 2018 2:40 am

I agree with you, but i think we have different standards of fluency from the target market (which is probably a similar market to Duolingo). Six months regardless is definitely too short (without putting in a lot of time/effort), but i don't know that between six months and a year is impossible at the advertised 30 minutes/day (same as Assimil, though in my experience that number can quickly go up to 40-60 min/day). You probably won't be at a B2 level from the app within a year, but Assimil courses can take you to a comfortable B1 where communication is a bit easier and you can start to actually enjoy a lot of native content. I wouldn't consider myself fluent at that level, but i've seen a lot of people claim fluency with much less.

In the end it's just marketing and i'm also rather sceptical of the claim, but if the method is any good (seems to be missing an active/"speaking" section, at least) it doesn't sound too outlandish. At least he doesn't say "learn like a child" ;)
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby garyb » Thu May 31, 2018 8:50 am

That kind of marketing is very off-putting. The worst offender I've seen is Babbel: claims about learning in days or weeks, often appearing next to "one weird trick" and miracle weight-loss ads at the bottom of questionable news sites. It's not a product I could ever take seriously. This one seems a little more moderate though, and it's important to remember that almost every language course markets itself with outlandish claims, even ones that are considered high-quality here. Michel Thomas imples that you'll be fluent after the eight hours, Assimil claims it'll take you to B2, and Pimsleur has been associated with dodgy affiliates who'd say anything to make a sale.
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby tastyonions » Thu May 31, 2018 6:09 pm

My favorite is “Language teachers hate him!”
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Nico546 » Fri Jun 01, 2018 1:41 pm

Hey, It's time for me to tell my opinion, but I'll be hard on this thing, but honnest.

These apps do not work for a simple reason: nothing/no one will ever teach you a language because nobody can make the effort to learn for yourself. + it's not always feeding your needs in terms of vocabulary (duolingo teaches a lot of weird and never used sentences with animals :? ).

The advertisements you mentionned ("Language teachers hate him!", or "What if you could learn a new language in just 6 months?"...) are the typical scams and dishonest ads we can find online, such has: "dematologists hate her" or "make your p***s grow up of 20cm".

My favorite ad are those two red-haired twins of Babbel... Look at these guys! :lol:
I've no idea if they actually exists or if they are a digital ad that belongs to babbel. It's ridiculous how they show how many languages they speak and the way it makes believe that babbel app teached them everything they know (but in reality, they never used it to learn these languages :lol:)

This is nothing but marketing, business, and this "Wyner" (winner?) looks like the perfect caricature of the commercial selling products that already exists and showing them as an innovation. He uses the same technics as seduction and personnal developpment coaches. They try to sell you the miracle product, but if there were a miracle way to boost our memory, we would know it right?

I'm not saying that new technologies suck to learn languages (even though handwritting is a powerful memory tool).
Some apps are better than others (LWT - Learn with Texts is my favourite, and Anki is great for spaced repetition). These tools are free and open source. They just lack of ergonomy (especially for LWT that requires to set up a local/online server).

In my opinion, the keys to remember words is to be curious, to search for translations, to speak with people (the best way actually, but it requires to know some basics). An app can't replace or fill-in your brain.
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Uncle Roger » Tue Jun 05, 2018 1:23 pm

I believe people should stop thinking in terms of "hours" and start thinking in terms of "distance". The time it'll take you to cover that distance is a function of your speed.

Solid B2/C1 is said to be the 3000 most used lemmas (i.e. headwords) for a European language. Grammatically simpler languages such as the Scandinavian ones, Dutch and English have grammar and syntax that can easily be encapsulated in some 50-100 notions. I doubt phonetics are much more than that.

I say that with 30 mins a day of spaced repetition (20 new items per day, including grammar and phonetics), 30 mins of listening (LIE for the win, again, SRS, subs2SRS etc) and 30 mins of other drills (say reading out loud or maybe a Skype class?) you can get to a very good point for certain languages in 6 months of 1.5 hours a day, less than 300 hours in total. Perfectly compatible with most work schedules and lives, IF and only IF you have the self-discipline.

Take that prescription twice a day (e.g. morning session and afternoon session) and you can aim for 3-4 months of three hours a day.
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby crush » Wed Jun 06, 2018 3:51 am

Uncle Roger wrote:Solid B2/C1 is said to be the 3000 most used lemmas (i.e. headwords) for a European language.
Where is this from? When studying Spanish, i studied (via SRS) the top 5k Spanish words from the Routledge Frequency Dictionary, and that was after was after finishing FSI (around 3 hours/day for 7 months, + Skype sessions, SharedTalk, watching movies, etc., closer to 6-7 hours of Spanish total each day). After FSI i was conversational, but my vocabulary was limited. Learning the top 5k words helped, but reading was still very difficult and i had to intensively read -- marking all unknown words and studying via SRS -- another 8-10 books (around 4-5k more "lemmas") before i started to feel a comfortable B2. I've seen others throw these (in my mind) very low numbers out before, but to me 3-5k lemmas is closer to B1, definitely not C1. And without the drills from FSI, my speaking would be very limited. And after a year of studying, i moved to Spain.

B2 in 3-4 months at 3 hours a day (unless you are moving between Romance languages) just doesn't seem realistic. If you had an outlined method i'd be happy to try it out and prove myself wrong, though ;)
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby Uncle Roger » Wed Jun 06, 2018 7:13 am

Hi

I mean 3000 lemmas. In a Latin language, that would equate to many more "words" as a verb that would have just 5 forms or so in English (to eat, eats, ate, eaten, eating?) would have many more in say Italian or Spanish. That could be one of the reasons. I have seen similar frequency dictionaries for the languages I am interested in and they present each tense as a specific word because they think learners are too scared to see a paradigm. Same for positive form of adjectives and comparative and/or superlative forms.

In my opinion, you should have started with the 5k straight away. 5k (whether single words or lemmas) is still A LOT. You can't fast track it. It takes constant effort, which is why it should be planned and started straight away. I can totally believe other aspects of the language can have a logistic curve progression and have that moment in which "everything starts to click". Not so for vocabulary in my opinion and people tend to underestimate it. It won't be your imperfect grammar or pronunciation to hold you back. It'll be your vocabulary, because that will dictate how much of native speech you can understand, which in turns dictates how much you can really converse with natives before shutting down and having to ask them to repeat much more slowly or to speak English.
You won't be the first foreigner a native hears speaking the language as... ehrm, a foreigner. But being forced to ramp down from a vocabulary of say 10000 lemmas to one of say 2000 for the sake of your comprehension... well, that's a big ask, so it's not going to happen. It would require a specific effort from the native, whereas making sense of your imperfect grammar or pronounciation or even the direct and unidiomatic translations from your native language will be a much more automatic process for him/her.

Realistically, I think you can communicate well enough with maybe 1000 lemmas. You just learn to simplify things and say all you need to with that little you want. But your passive vocabulary needs a lot more.

However, the 3000 figure is not far off, try and look for the paper by Milton and Alexiou, for them English is about 3000 for B1, 3500 for B2, 4000 for C1. They seem to mean "words", even though that is closer to "lemmas" than it could be for any other European language when it comes to English.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _languages

I'd like Reineke's academic input on this. Either way, 3000 or 5000 doesn't change the fact that, IMO, you have to forget about "time" and start thinking about "distance" and prioritise vocabulary massively.
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Re: The Fluent Forever App

Postby reineke » Fri Jun 08, 2018 10:28 pm

Gosh.

Extensive Reading Foundation Graded Reader Scale Comparison chart

Level 14 Early Advanced (3000 headwords)
Level 15 Mid Advanced 3600 headwords (overlaps with C1)
Level 16 High Advanced 4500 headwords (overlaps with C2)
Level 17 Early near-native 6,000 headwords ("Bridge")
Level 18 Mid near-native 8000 headwords
Level 19 High near-native 12,000 headwords
"Bridge" 6,000 - 12,000 headwords
Near native (unqualified) 12,000 - 18,000 headwords
Level 20 Native 18,000 headwords

A headword is similar to a dictionary entry where a group of words share the same basic meaning. E.g. helps, helping, helpful, helpless.

CEFR Levels and vocabulary size

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=3424

"In the following table -- which represents the main conclusions of this study -- we see the percent coverage of all tokens in three different registers (oral, fiction, and non-fiction) at three different levels of lexemes -- top 1000 words, top 2000 and top 3000.

Table 3. Percent coverage of tokens by groups of types/lemma

table 3.png


As the data indicate, a limited vocabulary of 1000 words would allow language learners to recognize between 75-80% of all lexemes in written Spanish, and about 88% of all lexemes in spoken Spanish (which is due to the higher repetition of basic words in the spoken register). Subsequent extensions of the base vocabulary have increasingly marginal importance. By doubling the vocabulary list to 2000 words, we account for only about 5-8% more words in a given text, and the third thousand words in the list increases this only about 2-4% more. There clearly is a law of “diminishing returns” in terms of vocabulary learning.
The [table 4] indicates how the data from Spanish compares to that of Nation (2000) for English and Jones (2003) for German.

table 4.png


The data from Spanish and English are roughly comparable, but there is an important difference in the way in which the data was obtained. In Nation (2000), the words are grouped by what he calls “word families”, so that [courage, discouragement, encourage] would all be grouped under the headword [COURAGE], and [paint, painted, painter, painting] would all be grouped under the headword [PAINT]. In our study, however, we used the traditional lemma approach, in which pintar, pintura, pintor, and pintoresco would all be assigned to different lemma, and [pintamos, pinto, and pintarás] would all be assigned to the lemma [PINTAR]. Because we separate the nominal, verbal, and adjectival uses, we might expect that the same number of headwords would lead to less text coverage than in English. The fact that this does not happen, however, is probably due to the fact that English has a larger lexical stock than Spanish, due to the influence of native Anglo-Saxon and imported Franco-Norman and Latinate words (e.g. real, royal, regal). The fact that the same amount of lexemes in German leads to lower textual coverage is somewhat more difficult to explain. It may be due to the still-incomplete state of the German tagger (Jones, p.c.). Or again, it may be due to a generally larger lexical stock in German than in Spanish, though this is much more debatable.

10. Conclusion

Hopefully the preceding discussion provides some useful insight into the issue of vocabulary range and text coverage, and the way in which the extracted data can be used to create a more useful frequency dictionary of Spanish. From the point of view of a language learner, the important point is that text coverage clearly obeys the law of diminishing returns. With about 4000 words, a language learner would be able to recognize more than 90% of the words in a typical native speaker conversation. If s/he learns two thousand more words, however, this will increase coverage by only about 3-4%. We have also seen that the degree of coverage is a function of register and part of speech, and have provided detailed data to support this view. We have also considered the role of vocabulary range, and how factors such as register affect this as well."

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=2875

Selecting Television Programs for Language Learning: Investigating Television Programs from the Same Genre

"In a corpus-driven study looking at the number of words needed to understand the vocabulary in television programs, Webb and Rodgers (2009a) found that a vocabulary size of 3000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words provided 95.45% coverage of a corpus made up of 88 television programs from a variety of genres."

"Webb and Rodgers (2009a) findings also shed light on differences between television genres. Children’s programs were found to have the smallest vocabulary load; the most frequent 2000 word families, plus proper nouns and marginal words accounted for 95% coverage. The most frequent 3000 word families plus proper nouns and marginal words accounted for 95% of American drama, older programs, situation comedies and British programs. The genres with the greatest proportions of low frequency words were news stories and science fiction programs. Results also indicated that coverage is likely to vary between episodes of programs leading Webb and Rodgers to suggest that randomly viewing programs may limit comprehension. Instead they proposed watching programs from within the same subgenre that have similar topics and storyline."

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 02&p=50563

"Knowing a word entails knowing many things about the word: its literal meaning, its various connotations, its spelling, its derivations, collocations (knowing the words that usually co-occur with the target word), frequency, pronunciation, the syntactic constructions it is used in, the morphological options it offers and a rich variety of semantic associates such as synonyms, antonyms, homonyms (Nagy and Scott, 2000)."
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 56&p=66462

Lexical chunks

'Native English speakers have tens or hundreds of thousands--estimates vary--of these formulae at their command,' he says. 'A student could learn 10 a day for years and still not approach native-speaker competence.'"
(Ben Zimmer, "On Language: Chunking." The New York Times Magazine, Sep. 19, 2010)".
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... t=chunking

"Using a 4.7-million-word sample of North American English conversation from the Cambridge International Corpus (CIC), and applying corpus analytical software to obtain a frequency count for recurrent chunks, the following totals emerge for chunks occurring more than 20 times:

two-word chunks 19,509
three-word chunks 12,681
four-word chunks 2,953
five-word chunks 385

Chunks and Single Words

Only 14 items in a single-word frequency list occur more often than the most frequent chunk (i.e., you know, which occurs 45,873 times). Of the first 100 items in the overall frequency list, 11 are two-word chunks, including I think and I mean. By the time we reach 500 items, there are 177 two-word chunks and 7 three-word chunks, that is, 35% of the most frequent items are chunks, not single words."

"experience changes the quality of lexical representations, and does so differently for different words and different individuals. Some aspects of this relationship are well-described, including the logarithmic relationship between word frequency of occurence and behavioral correlates of word recognition: ten exposures to an infrequent word may have a similarly strong impact on the quality of that word’s mental representation as 100 exposures to a word that is well entrenched in one’s mental lexicon...
Importantly, it may not be simply the number of exposures to a word – larger for good readers, smaller for poor ones, due to their differences in reading experience – that would give rise to individual variability. It may be that poor readers are not able to use the exposures they do get to create the kind of high quality lexical representations that skilled readers have.. .

For example, readers who make fewer phonological discriminations due to poor phonological processing skills will not end up with the same quality of lexical representation after 100 exposures than someone without phonological problems would end up with, even if their level of reading experience is matched. The same holds true for readers with a limited learning capacity or a compromised long-term lexical memory, or any other behavioral or organic characteristic that impedes the entrenchment of mental lexical representation: in all these cases the readers would have to have a larger number of exposures to a word than readers without those characteristics to create a representation of the same quality..."

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 22&p=97879

A million things can hold you back including not being able to recognize all that lovely vocabulary aurally. One can also communicate with a handful of words.
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