Lingvist

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mercutio
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Re: Lingvist

Postby mercutio » Sat Sep 24, 2016 6:42 pm

been testing this recently, has potential but I am frustrated by a few things

their lack of forum or generally replying to queries annoys me, I have been having some tech issues and they are super slow to reply.

also it doesn't accept some words I believe to be right, it makes you write what IT wants and you are not always sure what its asking

also the grammar notes don't seem to fit on the page so I can't always read them and wayyyy too technical

i like the idea of the site though
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jsega
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Re: Lingvist

Postby jsega » Sat Sep 24, 2016 11:42 pm

Languagezen.com seems to have a similar idea, for Spanish only, in terms of their use of data mining to not only give you relevant sentences (mostly what languagezen.com is, a lexical approach) but personalized tracking of each thing you have trouble with in the sentence.

Instead of simply right vs. wrong feedback, it tracks exactly what you got wrong in that sentence and will continue reintroducing and drilling you on that. That seems to be the idea in a nutshell anyway.

Really interesting, I'm currently trying the free first month out on languagezen.com and just applied to the Spanish beta on lingvist.
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Cainntear
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Re: Lingvist

Postby Cainntear » Sun Sep 25, 2016 8:04 am

mercutio wrote:also it doesn't accept some words I believe to be right, it makes you write what IT wants and you are not always sure what its asking

The problem is that it's pretending to be a fill-in-the-blanks exercise when it's really just single word flashcards. You can get the right answer by looking at the English and disregarding the French sentence completely, whereas the other way round doesn't work as there's not enough context in the sentence to indicate what word they're looking for.

Worse, if you do try to think about the meaning of the French sentence, you might end up confused because the given translation of the word doesn't always suit the context. E.g. c'est un ___ exemple. (beautiful, good-looking) -- it's "bel", but it has nothing to do with looks. It's an idiomatic phrase.

Then neither the reading or the listening does anything to support the learner beyond having a single word dictionary/glossary (not much use for idioms) and it makes a classic mistake from old-school computer language -- too much unsupported free choice. Most learners have no idea when it's appropriate to switch between task, so you should programme progression in for them. Give them options, but not free choice.
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mercutio
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Re: Lingvist

Postby mercutio » Tue Jun 20, 2017 11:28 pm

In case anyone is interested

I persisted with Lingvist and came to conclusion it's totally boring and uninspiring! It also still has big flaws

One massive annoying feature is you basically have to guess the word THEY want. Not necessarily the right word. For example I can't remember exactly but there was one I remember when it asked for school and it wanted instituto whereas of course escuela also means school, but I had to remember which one it wanted! This sort of annoying feature eventually drove me away

It was making me unlearn! I felt like a drone

It's basically to me like repeatedly typing out a dictionary the mental equivalent of repeatedly walking into a wall
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Lingvist

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed Jun 21, 2017 7:00 pm

Today I registered and took the Lingvist evaluation exam for French. The evaluation assumed I knew some 1600 of the 5000 words. The only words I remember missing were partout (?), everywhere, virer, to fire or sack someone, and pouvoir, which for some reason I tried to spell pouver. :oops:
As Cavesa mentions earlier in this thread, there were many words with English look-alikes. Is that a good idea? Depends. programme came up to mean program, but programme was the wrong answer for "broadcast," which was émission. Perhaps a lesson about false friends? I found it to be ever so distracting.
I like when you make a mistake, the reader whispers the correct answer to you, like a school chum across the aisle.
What is missing most of all for me is coherence. Using the words within a sentence is a good idea, but I would like the sentences to tell me a story. My understanding is that Assimil does this, as does Lingua Latina, and no doubt there are others. Coherence is also a strong point in studying movies and TV programs with subs2str. Each sentence from a movie or TV émission follows from the last. Some might condemn this as a weakness, but for me, incoherence leads very quickly to boredom. Plus it's more lifelike. Not a lot of real conversations go, "They had to fire him" followed by "There were flowers everywhere" (though one can imagine the one sentence following the other in a real conversation, of course). This kind of coherence also inheres in transcripts.
To make such a series of sentences, one would have to know a great deal about the literature, fiction and nonfiction, to find the right texts with a set of the 5000 in the right order for learning. Take this opening of a one-act drama by Georges Feydeau (I leave out the title of the play as being perhaps offensive to some ;) ):
Chez Follbraguet, cabinet de dentiste. Au fond, portes à droite et à gauche. Entre les deux portes, au centre de la cloison, un lavabo.

One could test as follows, asking the user to type in the underlined words:
Chez Follbraguet, cabinet de dentiste.
Au fond, portes à droite et à gauche.
Entre les deux portes, au centre de la cloison, un lavabo.
You're testing basic words (I think), with cabinet (here meaning 'office,' testing a false friend, portes 'doors' sort of a false friend, and centre a near lookalike (if lookalikes are what you want) of the English word.

Jiminy Cricket, maybe I've gone beyond the bounds of the OP, so I'll stop.

I won't go on with the French lingvist, though for grins tomorrow I might give the Spanish a go to see how many words I 'know.'
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mercutio
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Re: Lingvist

Postby mercutio » Tue Jun 27, 2017 7:36 pm

I criticised Lingvist very very mildly more an enquiry if the app will be updated or changed, I did this on Facebook and they banned me from their Facebook page

I felt it important to pass this on as I don't think a company should behave like that
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Re: Lingvist

Postby Xmmm » Tue Jun 27, 2017 8:38 pm

To be fair to lingvist ...

My understanding is that you are supposed to blast through the 5000 flashcards as a sort of stripped down, dumbed down version of anki in order to get a jump start on the language. You then dive into the graduated readings and audio files, where the real value is.

I used the French beta back in 2014 and was very happy with my results.

The reason I am not a fan of lingvist is different. There is only so much time allotted to us on this world. At the pace they work at it will never be ready for any language I want to learn. Last time I checked russian was flashcards only, and by now I have moved beyond the point where the other material would be useful.

So what have they been doing the last three years? They are going to soirees and award ceremonies all the time, they shake hands with president of Estonia every couple weeks. But the app doesn't look that much different than it did in 2014. And do they have full support for all four languages they are offering? They are rolling out one language a year it seems like.

I don't know maybe they are taking a 100 years to world domination approach to the language market ... but I sympathize with their investors ...

Edited with an update:

I just logged into my lingvist account. If you look at French from English, across the top there are icons for "Learn", "Read", "Listen". Everything good about Lingvist is under "Read" and "Listen". But if you look at Spanish, German, and Russian ... all they have is "Learn". Which is amazing because I'm pretty sure the process of getting the frequency list and picking the sentences is at least semi-automated. So ... what do they do with their free time? :)
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Stefan
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Re: Lingvist

Postby Stefan » Tue Jun 27, 2017 9:13 pm

mercutio wrote:One massive annoying feature is you basically have to guess the word THEY want. Not necessarily the right word. For example I can't remember exactly but there was one I remember when it asked for school and it wanted instituto whereas of course escuela also means school, but I had to remember which one it wanted! This sort of annoying feature eventually drove me away.

This isn't completely true since I've used synonyms on multiple occasions but I agree that they could add more. They probably will but it's still a relatively new-developed tool. I wish a leave feedback function would be prioritised. The character limit and text field width tend to be good giveaways on which word they are looking for though. If they force me to learn a synonym, then so be it.

mercutio wrote:It's basically to me like repeatedly typing out a dictionary the mental equivalent of repeatedly walking into a wall

The memorize part is basically cloze deletion of a frequency list with L1 translations. That's Anki which is one of the most recommended tools within the language learning community. You get a few extra features such as char limit, text field width, explanations, goals, stats, audio, translations, srs and red highlighting on specific characters if you make spelling mistakes. It also accepts ü for u, ö for o and vice versa.

They also offer reading and listening for some languages such as French. Reading is a regular text (dialog, literature, article, joke, misc) with a built in popup translation when clicking on a word and a percentage of how many of the words you have memorised. Listening is identical but with added audio.



To summarise:

- srs tool with frequency list
- reading with popup dictionary
- audio for shadowing

So far they have English, Spanish, German, French and Russian.

As Xmmm points out, the main issue is the slow development. Don't expect them to add anything in the near future although they did launch their new list with known words last week. If you're looking for an improved srs frequency list, then I'm sure you'll enjoy it. I find it extremely satisfying to learn a new word only to stumble upon it a few days later when doing my extensive reading.
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Re: Lingvist

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jun 27, 2017 9:15 pm

I wouldn't hold that against them at all, if they did only a few languages, just really well. And in such a case, I'd wish them all the hand shaking they dream of.

But after my try of Lingvist French, I simply wouldn't recommend it to a beginner, as I think a beginner should be exposed to vocabulary in completely correct examples. Not in examples that are technically not wrong, yet in which natives use a totally different and very frequent word that the learner should memorize instead. A beginner is not able to tell whether the word is used correctly.
Plus MorkTheFiddle is completely right a beginner could learn a lot of false friends this way. Yes, we all use the shared vocabulary as an advantage, but nourishing the "hey, it's just English with different ending" attitude too much is not a good idea in my honest opinion.

I think Lingvist has a lot of potential, but the company probably isn't aware of competition, that might be the reason behind not being perfectionists. But there is Clozemaster, there is Memrise, there are other projects that are free or not that expensive being started every now and then.

Right now, I would recommend people Clozemaster instead. More content, 10000 words, good quality examples, functioning support, an option to flag a wrong sentence, should you encounter it, more langauge combinations.
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luke
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Re: Lingvist

Postby luke » Wed Jun 28, 2017 8:37 am

Some of us went hog wild with The Lingvist when it first came out over at HTLAL.

Cavesa wrote:Right now, I would recommend people Clozemaster instead. More content, 10000 words, good quality examples, functioning support, an option to flag a wrong sentence, should you encounter it, more langauge combinations.


Merci! I like this new Clozemaster site. Lot of language combinations. I like the feedback loop.
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