I went to an interesting talk once at the Boston Python meetup, where a guy figured out how to order sentences so could learn them in an order where you already knew the "other" words in the sentence. Basically, making a directed graph of vocabulary.<p>He was doing it to learn Latin, but you could do it for any language.
How do you decide on which sentences to use?<p>I'm interested in generating example sentences myself, but in a way, that chooses sentences that are simple, easy to understand and support the word, they are supposed to exemplify.<p>For example "She got a <i></i>car<i></i> for her birthday, while she was traveling in Italy eating pizza" does not tell the reader anything about what a car is, or how the word should be used. However "He drives his car to work", is a much better example of what a car is, what is a common associated verb and how it fits in a sentence.<p>How do you optimise selection for sentence like the latter?
I've always thought that the Simple English article versions of Wikipedia were always useful for non-native English speakers. <a href="https://simple.wikipedia.org/" rel="nofollow">https://simple.wikipedia.org/</a><p>Most people seem to be unaware of this Wikipedia aspect.
Very cool! Although I feel that sometimes you really need a human touch to make it truly comprehended. For instance, I random clicked on "antediluvian":<p><a href="https://buildmyvocab.in/antediluvian/" rel="nofollow">https://buildmyvocab.in/antediluvian/</a><p>Everything here will get you a "good enough" understanding of what the word means, but this is the only one that really comes close to explaining the word's literal meaning, and it's too vague to be of much use:<p><i>any of the early patriarchs who lived prior to the Noachian deluge</i><p>A non-native speaker isn't going to have any idea what "Noachian" means (a native speaker probably isn't either unless they can explicitly identify "Noah" as the root), and "deluge" is part of the root of the word we're defining, so simply using the word "deluge" without explaining what it means doesn't really help.<p>In short, this is a good groundwork, but I think it needs a human editor to push the individual definitions from "acceptable" to "correct".
I find there's a lot of material for studying isolated words, but as an engineer, analyzing the sentence patterns and grammar is more interesting.<p>I'm working on a project to do this for a database of Chinese grammar patterns. When there's enough sentence examples for each pattern as structured data, we can then make games and other learning tools. For example:
yīnwèi / 因为 / because
<a href="http://cgram.rikai-bots.com/grammar/yinwei" rel="nofollow">http://cgram.rikai-bots.com/grammar/yinwei</a><p>Now there's a magnets game to try to use that pattern:
<a href="http://cgram.rikai-bots.com/magnets/?cnames=yinwei" rel="nofollow">http://cgram.rikai-bots.com/magnets/?cnames=yinwei</a><p>I would be happy to share the repo with anyone who's interested, or using the data to make some other language learning games. PS I did a similar thing for japanese before: JGram.org and it really helped me learn japanese quickly.
In the same vein, for French translation, Linguee[1] uses many sources from websites of organisations that display official content in several languages (eg. the websites of the EU, of the Canadian Parliament...).
The fact that it's <i>official</i> texts (eg. laws) makes it quite reliable.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.linguee.fr" rel="nofollow">http://www.linguee.fr</a>
This is pretty cool.<p>The second word I clicked was "cant"....and about half I saw were
typos of "can't", so, there's some bad data in there if you're trying to learn standard english, but it's good data if you want to understand things people actually write.<p>Anyway, time to go through and add some apostrophes to a few articles. :-)
Is there a word list for TOEFL and/or IELTS?<p>I'm using a similar strategy (movies, music, Bible, articles) for studying Chinese. I'm using the TOCFL and HSK word lists. My friend uses a book with a list of 15000 vocabulary words by Morris Hill. I can't find a txt version though.
<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buildmyvocab.app" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buildmyvoc...</a><p>is this your app abhas ?
Quite interesting
This list is to help non-native English learners? Many native English speakers might have trouble with a few of these: abeyance, abscission, accretion, amalgamate, anodyne, antediluvian, apposite, arabesque, atavism, and avuncular.
Very nice! Thanks for sharing!<p>Some words are not found: <a href="https://buildmyvocab.in/affinity" rel="nofollow">https://buildmyvocab.in/affinity</a><p>(Just a little correction there: does not exist*)
I created something similar using the Wordnik api. <a href="https://www.greedge.com/grewordlist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.greedge.com/grewordlist/</a>
Very cool. As others have said I think you should add definitions for the words (even a link off to an external one is fine) and pronunciation (with audio, perhaps link to forvo.com?) would be superb.
Mining canonical papers/text to generate standardized tests (SAT/GRE) might be a further step. My guess is that both tests and commercial prep-material are produced by committee.
Neat.<p>::clicks on a random word::<p>"We couldn't find any sentences for the word centripetal."<p>So... Why is it one of the chosen few?
1. I don't really understand what this is about. Having a description on the landing page would help.<p>> Barron's 800 Words list with example sentences<p>who is this Barron?<p>2. Please can you add pronunciation :D<p>3. words need a definition as well, not sure what some of these means even with the examples.
i am one of learner's of English, but i can't.. tips me to get my English perfect.. <a href="http://www.mrstatus.in/himbhoomi-jamabandi-copy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mrstatus.in/himbhoomi-jamabandi-copy/</a>