30:30 Vocabulary Challenge - July 2023

[rdearman]

I had a look at the first entry: bustirapus: a robber of tombs

Am I the only one who thinks this would be a really good Rap name? Bustirapus

[Xenops]

Despite my traveling through July 4th, I’m going with Danish. I’m still at the awkward transition from Norwegian where I’m not always sure what the correct word is in Danish (or how it’s pronounced). I’ll be using the book of Genesis from the Old Testament.

[inu]

I'm feeling a little adventurous... Count me in (French).

[tomhal]

I like the idea of this challenge. I am in. I am going to tackle German.

[untrucdeouf]

Good luck to everyone!

So far my first technical roadblock is that I've had a hell of a time trying to get the Google Sheets template (very kindly provided by rdearman and updated by coldrainwater!) to match values separated by a comma and a space when multiple words are involved.
Example:
B2 = "mabaliw"
C2 = "to go crazy, to be crazy"

I've tried everything I can think of but the existing formula in column F won't accept either "to go crazy" or "to be crazy" as accurate responses for me. It seems to be something to do with how the formula is parsing the space character as a delimiter.

For anyone else running into this, I've cobbled together the very inelegant solution of putting this formula in column I:
=ArrayFormula(INDEX(SPLIT(SUBSTITUTE(C2,", ","|"),"|")))

And this formula in column F:
=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(D2,I2:M2,0)),0,1)

And then hiding columns I through M.

I'm sure there's a substantially better way to do this! Accepting any and all refinements (and also would be thrilled for someone to point out that I'm missing something totally obvious).

[coldrainwater]

match values separated by a comma and a space when multiple words are involved

Thanks for pointing this out. I do see an error in the formula and I apologize for not testing it more thoroughly before challenge start. The split_by_each parameter needs to be set to false instead of true for it to work right. It is currently splitting by either a space or a comma which is why it evaluates multi-word answers as false. Instead, we want it to be split by a comma concatenated with a space. I corrected the formula by changing a 1 to a 0 below. So far it is working on the spreadsheet I tested it on using your example.

Here is the original formula:

Code: Select all

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(D2,SPLIT(C2, ", " , 1,1),0)),0,1)

Here is the corrected formula:

Code: Select all

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(D2,SPLIT(C2, ", " , 0,1),0)),0,1)

[untrucdeouf]

Thanks coldrainwater! That updated formula works perfectly for me now as well. Really appreciate your help.

[rdearman]

I've also updated the download sheet with the improved formula.

[Querneus]

Here is a quick link to the list I am using. I ended up going with Latin. If anyone else has an interest in learning Latin vocabulary and would like to leverage my list as a part of their challenge preparation, feel free to do so. I made a more elaborate post in my log describing the list in detail.

Curious words you have there... Out of curiosity how did you go about collecting them? Did you just choose random Lewis & Short entries by any chance?

I had a look at the first entry: bustirapus: a robber of tombs

Am I the only one who thinks this would be a really good Rap name? Bustirapus

It sure looks like an homage to Busta Rhymes while containing "rap"...

[coldrainwater]

Curious words you have there... Out of curiosity how did you go about collecting them? Did you just choose random Lewis & Short entries by any chance?

Mostly, I wanted them to be unknown for challenge purposes and settled on Lewis and Short because Philolog.us made it fast, easy, and efficient to scroll through the dictionary letter by letter, eventually obtaining sufficient volume to participate. I didn't pick them by frequency or randomly. There are some excellent lists with more helpful terms like the one from LLPSI that I didn't pick since I would rather meet them via context using the original study material and without distilling the experience via prior learning.

There were some general tendencies that I noted simply because I spent so long making it. I avoided most grammar-heavy terms since I should be able to tackle those in their appropriate context. Furthermore, I wasn't keen on inundating a vocabulary list with grammar. I avoided both proper nouns and cognates, the latter of which probably excluded most of the dictionary technically. I also tried to make the terms themselves strongly distinct from one another, but also memorable enough to form an interesting, if a bit peculiar, list. Part of the reason for the cognate omission is that for scoring purposes, I don't want to be able to look at a Latin term and see another English word embedded inside it, either by root or otherwise. In my mind, I would unfairly get credit for learning a new word without putting in the actual challenge effort to do so. I made a few exceptions to this with terms that personally had more interest in than usual.

I initially wanted to do German but after coming up with about 100 terms and then promptly deleting about 20 of them, I realized my own pickiness would likely prevent me from ever getting to the 900 unknown terms required so I moved to a language I had not studied, knowing that my mining prospects would undoubtedly be better. A non-mining technique that might work for some people is to start a language cold via a reading-heavy approach and let the unknown words accumulate in synch with the challenge participation.