LingQ Discussion, Part 2

Steve: Well, it certainly goes back to what I had in my book about what I called at that time convivium. In other words, that this is sort of a learning community where people are helping each other learn. The services that a native speaker of Japanese, French, Hindi, whatever, can offer is A: to create content, but even to get on and talk with people who are learning his or her language so that I think we’ll have a much stronger sense of learning community in the new system. Now, if this content then, if we move along, as this content is integrated with our learning system, what are the main features of the new LingQ System? Integration to our system means what? What does that mean to the learner?

Mark: Well, those of you who are familiar with The Linguist System, the general approach is the same. You begin by selecting content of interest in the store. Whether you search by category or you search by key word or choose an item that’s been recommended to you, however you find it, you search the store and you find content that you are interested in and using the statistics that we provide that is at your level.

Steve: I think I might just stress that there will be a lot of content in there; some beginner or a little easier and some quite difficult. Okay, the learner is interested in travel or some subject, how can they find material that is at their level?

Mark: Well, we have two key metrics that we use to identify the level; one is the number of new words or, more specifically, the percentage of new words in a content item. I think the percentage can vary depending on the language but, in general, the lower the percentage of new words in the item the easier it’s going to be. I mean, you can expand on this probably a little better than I, but in terms of you may be trying to achieve fluency or you may be trying to learn more words, it can depend how low you want to go in terms of percentage in one situation versus another. Maybe you want to expand on that?

Steve: Well yeah, I think some people who are quite advanced may be looking for content that has new words for them because they want to increase their vocabulary and maybe a lot of the new items they pick up will have very few new words, which is good for fluency; it might be good for pronunciation, but sometimes maybe they want to challenge themselves. So, they can really select how difficult they want to make it for themselves. We normally recommend that beginner learners listen more often to content and the more advanced learners are changing and selecting new content more often and we think this will be a good metric, as you call it. The other one, of course, is we will identify those content items that have the words that they are trying to learn. We won’t go into detail but, in other words, obviously, if they can encounter again the words that they are in the process of learning, there’s a greater likelihood that those words will stick. So, all of this will help and other recommendations that we’ll make will help the learner basically maximize, like to be as efficient as possible, in the content that he or she is listening to and reading.

Mark: You brought up the priority links, basically, the priority list of words for each learner to learn right now. That’s a big improvement that came out of the experience our members had on the old system where they would end up savings lots of words and they didn’t know which words were more important than others. Where should I be spending my time? It becomes difficult to study all the new words that you encounter so we wanted a way that could help the learner identify the most important words to learn first and, of course, as those words are learned then they are replaced by the next most important words and so that is, in effect, our priority links.

Steve: So that means we have a list of 25 words which at any given time are the words with the highest priority; in other words, the words that have the highest frequency level of the words that you are trying to learn, so you may as well learn those first.

Mark: That’s right. By frequency level we mean frequency, if we are talking about English, frequency with which those words appear in English.

Steve: Right.

Mark: The words that appear most often should be at the top of the list.

Steve: You know it’s interesting, I’ve been studying Russian. I produced a list through The Linguist System, which I’ve been testing for Russian. I had a group of words there that I was trying to learn that came out of the novel War and Peace by Tolstoy and I asked if one of our Russian speaking learners would record it for me. One very kind learner, Pavel from Russia, he recorded it for me but he said these three words, nobody uses them today. Those are like from the 19th century. So, it’s very important for me to know that. I may still say I want to read Tolstoy. I may still say these are important to me because I’m reading novels that were written in the 19th century or I may say okay, I won’t bother with these words and the system will tell me these words are less important and so I can focus on the key words that I need to learn at this stage in my learning.

Mark: Yeah and, you know, if there are words that people don’t use anymore that appear in a book like Tolstoy, chances are they are going to reappear. If they matter enough in that book then they are going to reappear enough times that you’ll learn them anyway, but for the word that you are never going to see again, you don’t have to spend time trying to learn it. I know myself that’s very valuable to know: that this word is essentially useless, don’t learn it.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Spend your time learning the frequently occurring words and you’re going to be much further ahead. That’s why in our overview page we always show your current list of priority links and where you can look them up, of course, and test them using flash cards. But throughout the system, we try to promote this idea of the priority links and carry it through into all of our different modules, including the number that enables you to identify content in the store, the content with the highest number of these priority links in it. Then also when we have the writing and the speaking systems working, you’ll be able to see lists of the priority links so that you can practice using them. Sort of the whole focus of vocabulary, or not the whole focus but a good part of it, will be on churning your way through your priority links and, of course, as you remove one it’s replaced by another, but at least you’re learning these words in order of importance, which should make your vocabulary learning more efficient.

Steve: And you’re guided towards content that has these priority links in it, so all of this is going to make it easier for you to learn those important words. Of course, it is true that if you know the more frequent words, it makes you a better reader and so you actually start being able to guess better at those few words that are perhaps lower frequency words. Because you know so many of the other words and you are able to read them so well that even the unknown words, now you get a better chance at guessing their meaning so with a little help, you can get on to learning them. So, the order in which you learn words I think is quite important.

Mark: For sure and I mean you probably remember the statistics. You have a better head for remembering statistics about what percentage of everyday English is made up of the most frequent 2,000 words or whatever group you’re studying, but it’s very high.

Steve: It is very high and, of course, say the first 2,000 words which make up anywhere from 80 to 85-90 percent of a given context, those appear very frequently and, therefore, they are easier to learn. The difficulty is the remaining words. I know from my own personal experience that I need lots of words for the things that I want to do in the language. I want to have an intelligent conversation. I want to read a book. We need a lot of words. If you can orient your listening and reading towards content that will enable you to see these words again and if you can study them in sort of an order of importance, it’s going to make it more efficient for you.