Re: German group
Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2017 2:54 am
There's already a seperate thread about it but I wanted to let this group know that Lingvist has put their German course into public beta. I got an email about it yesterday but didn't actually start playing with it until today.
A brief intro into what Lingvist is for those who haven't used it. It gives you sentences with a word missing and a translation of both the word and the sentence. You type in the word. If you're correct you move on and if you aren't it will show you the word and prompt you to type it again. The textbox limits the amount of characters you can type to the number of letters in the word (this was exceedingly helpful for me when I was using it for French which is really hard for me spelling wise). It also uses an SRS algorithm. Most if not all of the courses have 5,000 words and claim to take you to B2 (reading?) proficiency within 200 hours of using the application. The words are taken from a corpus/corpora and are (supposedly) the 5000 most common words in the language that you're learning. At the moment it's in free public beta but for the entirety of its existence it has warned that eventually it'll likely become a paid service. There are also iOS and Android apps.
It's less fleshed out than the other courses in that it only has vocab (no reading or listening yet) and it appears that some of the features such as saying what gender a noun is aren't turned on for everyone. That said there are supposedly 5k words that you eventually will learn if you stick with it. It also tries to estimate your level if it appears you know some German. Their system of estimation is a mess right now (I know more than 471 German words...) but it appears that if you get a word that you are given/tested on correct the first time it counts it as "learned". At the moment it says I know 600 words which is up from the original 471 estimate.
A brief intro into what Lingvist is for those who haven't used it. It gives you sentences with a word missing and a translation of both the word and the sentence. You type in the word. If you're correct you move on and if you aren't it will show you the word and prompt you to type it again. The textbox limits the amount of characters you can type to the number of letters in the word (this was exceedingly helpful for me when I was using it for French which is really hard for me spelling wise). It also uses an SRS algorithm. Most if not all of the courses have 5,000 words and claim to take you to B2 (reading?) proficiency within 200 hours of using the application. The words are taken from a corpus/corpora and are (supposedly) the 5000 most common words in the language that you're learning. At the moment it's in free public beta but for the entirety of its existence it has warned that eventually it'll likely become a paid service. There are also iOS and Android apps.
It's less fleshed out than the other courses in that it only has vocab (no reading or listening yet) and it appears that some of the features such as saying what gender a noun is aren't turned on for everyone. That said there are supposedly 5k words that you eventually will learn if you stick with it. It also tries to estimate your level if it appears you know some German. Their system of estimation is a mess right now (I know more than 471 German words...) but it appears that if you get a word that you are given/tested on correct the first time it counts it as "learned". At the moment it says I know 600 words which is up from the original 471 estimate.