Lingvist

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mercutio
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Lingvist

Postby mercutio » Wed May 18, 2016 10:14 pm

Anyone using lingvist?

Any reviews?
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Re: Lingvist

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed May 18, 2016 11:02 pm

This?
https://lingvist.io/

I don't think I've seen it until I looked it up just a minute ago (after seeing your post). Learning a language in 200 hours... yeah, why not.
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Aozora
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Re: Lingvist

Postby Aozora » Wed May 18, 2016 11:10 pm

I used it for a few weeks and I like it. It's supposed to teach about 5000 word forms, using fill in the blank sentence examples. It covers the same word in different forms so you'll have different sentences for "petite" "petit" "petites" "petits", etc . I'm not sure how many distinct words it works out to be, but obviously it's fewer than 5000. I find the format pretty addictive, but I haven't used it in a while because my French grammar is lagging behind some of the sentences. There are also reading and listening materials that could be more helpful if I actually used them :D
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Re: Lingvist

Postby chayangratitude » Thu May 19, 2016 5:30 am

I have used both Duolingo and Lingvist in the past, and although I love Duolingo for what it is, Lingvist fares much better if you want to acquire words and grammar as a beginner. The main con with Duolingo is its introduction to large amounts of thematic vocabulary, which bums me out in tje long run. Lingvist seems to teach more colloquialisms and etc.
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Re: Lingvist

Postby jeffers » Thu May 19, 2016 10:35 am

I used it for a while, and I like it in principle, but for the main learning section it is fairly repetitive and unidirectional. The listening and reading section are pretty amazing, but frequently ignored. They don't do anything special that other websites don't do, but what's great is that it shows you how much of the audio or text you already know based on words you've covered in the main lessons.

I reviewed it on HTLAL, and there was a lot of discussion there. One of the developers actually answered some questions on the forum there. Here's the link: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=39610&PN=3

EDIT: Cavesa's statement on page 5 of that thread says it all: "It looks like there is finally an unanimously liked new product. :-) "
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Re: Lingvist

Postby Vindr » Thu May 19, 2016 12:44 pm

I'm quite fond of Lingvist, and use it almost daily. The memorize section is basically like cloze sentence cards with audio. Words do come up in multiple sentences, and in different forms, which I find useful. As for the 200 hour thing...well, I've been using the memorize section almost exclusively for probably around 4-6 months now (I know, I'm terrible for ignoring the reading and listening) and by their time tracker I'm at 100 hours. To go through 150 reviews, as the website recommends, takes me about 15-20 minutes a day.

Now, I can say that I haven't been actively studying grammar for the most part during the time I've been using Lingvist. This has given me a very vague, passive understanding of a good chunk of French grammar. For example, with verb tenses I might recognize how one is used, but I have absolutely no idea how to conjugate or actually use it myself. Obviously, this is solely because of how I've used the program, and mostly my lack of active grammar study otherwise. But I do think it's at least semi telling that Lingvist has managed to give me a pretty broad, if passive understanding of grammar with very little daily effort. And I know that I'm most definitely not using the website to it's fullest, so I'm sure somebody who did would get much, much more out of it.
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mercutio
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Re: Lingvist

Postby mercutio » Thu May 19, 2016 10:14 pm

Their blog says they are looking to employ some polyglots so might be worth checking out if you are one
Last edited by mercutio on Sat May 21, 2016 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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: 5 / 5 language transfer total Spanish :
: 5 / 5 paul noble Spanish :
: 5 / 5 M. Thomas foundation and advanced spanish:
: 5 / 5 Duolingo Spanish :


www.thelanguagequest.com

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Re: Lingvist

Postby Cavesa » Fri May 20, 2016 2:13 pm

I tried it out of curiosity. A good idea, quite well done. However, I would definitely welcome an ignore function for sentences you cannot skip but do not want to learn. For example, I found very early a sentence with a word which is used frequently, but not in the sense they are using it in. Sorry, I trust the native books (where I saw the word in the sense I consider more correct just that day!), tv series, reference books, Google, tatoeba, and my 16 years of experience much more than their frequency list. However, a beginner has little chance to find such things out, which is not good. I gave feedback and was basically responded no skip or other tool was needed, that my knowledge was wrong (which it wasn't). By the answer, I am under the impression the creator team may be great as informaticians, great at using databases like the frequency lists, but perhaps not that good at French (lacking natives).

So, it is a good supplement, a great idea, solidly made, but not reliable. Use it, but know you might get a few mistakes in the bundle too. I am gonna use it for other languages, but use other references heavily while doing so.
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Re: Lingvist

Postby jeffers » Sat May 21, 2016 2:16 pm

Cavesa wrote: ... I found very early a sentence with a word which is used frequently, but not in the sense they are using it in. Sorry, I trust the native books (where I saw the word in the sense I consider more correct just that day!), tv series, reference books, Google, tatoeba, and my 16 years of experience much more than their frequency list. However, a beginner has little chance to find such things out, which is not good. I gave feedback and was basically responded no skip or other tool was needed, that my knowledge was wrong (which it wasn't). By the answer, I am under the impression the creator team may be great as informaticians, great at using databases like the frequency lists, but perhaps not that good at French (lacking natives).


From what I understand, all of their sentences come directly from the corpus of texts they use for their frequency list. Of course this means that they may be examples in which a word is used in an unusual sense (and even natives make slip-ups when writing). Someone, somewhere, used that word in the sentence you saw, but that doesn't necessarily make it normal.
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Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (roughly, the perfect is the enemy of the good)

French SC Books: 0 / 5000 (0/5000 pp)
French SC Films: 0 / 9000 (0/9000 mins)

Cavesa
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Re: Lingvist

Postby Cavesa » Sun May 22, 2016 1:46 pm

jeffers wrote:
Cavesa wrote: ... I found very early a sentence with a word which is used frequently, but not in the sense they are using it in. Sorry, I trust the native books (where I saw the word in the sense I consider more correct just that day!), tv series, reference books, Google, tatoeba, and my 16 years of experience much more than their frequency list. However, a beginner has little chance to find such things out, which is not good. I gave feedback and was basically responded no skip or other tool was needed, that my knowledge was wrong (which it wasn't). By the answer, I am under the impression the creator team may be great as informaticians, great at using databases like the frequency lists, but perhaps not that good at French (lacking natives).


From what I understand, all of their sentences come directly from the corpus of texts they use for their frequency list. Of course this means that they may be examples in which a word is used in an unusual sense (and even natives make slip-ups when writing). Someone, somewhere, used that word in the sentence you saw, but that doesn't necessarily make it normal.


No, but if I cannot find any single example of their use of the word anywhere I look, except a dictionary that includes the meaning in a list of several, that doesn't make me believe their corpus in such a case. I checked it anywhere I could. Google, tatoeba, several web dictionaries with examples. I have always seen a synonyme used in similar sentences, and the word itself only used in other meanings. And I am fairly sure I have always heard another synonyme used by natives.

The point is not whether my sources are better than theirs, I am not trying to prove their corpus being totally made up due to me disagreeing on one word, that would be funny. And the beginners will need to learn tons of stuff that will get corrected afterwards.

The point is: there is no ignore button. If I wanted to use lingvist further (and I would like to, as it might be a nice review tool, once I'd get through the real basics), I would have to accept their sentence and memorize it. The software won't let me skip it. I even tried to create two accounts (due to slow connection, I accidentally scored significantly worse in the first test, which is a problem the stuff there knows about), and got stuck at the same word both times.

In the answer to my feedback message, I didn't get any answer to the question "what is your corpus based on". Newspapers? Books? I have no clue, have you found the information anywhere? What surprised me as well was the tendency to teach mostly English-like words at the beginning, despite existence of everyday French equivalents. I am simply curious what is the corpus based on. I am not a six year old child to blindly trust marketing and "our corpus is great, that is all you need to know" phrases. If I were so naive, I would have downloaded the RS.
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