How to understand half of Harry Potter book in any language (+ source code)

&#62; <i>... as I’ve already read all 7 books in 2 languages before - I could pick up a lot just from context...</i><p>That's what I've always said to my friends, but they insist on learning <i>grammar</i>, which of course they'll forget after a few hours/days. Three years ago I could hardly read anything non-technical in English, now I can understand <i>Lolita</i> - which is a hard novel to read for a non-native. All thanks to audiobooks.<p>I found that audiobooks are the most fantastic way of learning a new language... I couldn't have possibly read <i>Lolita</i> or <i>Silmarillion</i> before - They're just too hard for someone who is trying to learn a new language. Long sentences full of new/invented words - It's easy to lose the thread. But listening to a skillful reader reading them aloud, you can understand even the most complicated words and sentences just from the context, and the reader's tone and emphasize...<p>If you want to learn a new language, do yourself a favor and listen to some audiobooks. Pick a book you've already read in your native language (preferably more than once) and you'll be amazed how easy it is to understand and learn new words (you must have a basic understanding of that language of course).

I like the approach but I think it's a big mistake to not strip stop words. He should focus on nouns and verbs imo. The top words he lists are all stopwords/grammatical particles "de", "que", "la", "y" etc. I don't think knowing those words will help to understand anything. I think if you understand only the grammatical particles in a sentence it won't help at all to understand the meaning of the sentence. On the other hand if you know the verbs and nouns but not the grammatical particles you can at least infer some meaning or what it's about.

TL;DR Nearly half of the word occurrences in Harry Potter are prepositions, so if you learn a small number of them you can claim that you "understand half of Harry Potter". For example, you can absorb sparking dialogue like the following:<p>"Harry and to at to I to with Voldemort or what to and I do for, Hermoine!!"

So, the tl;dr is that this guy discovered that using a dictionary is a good way of learning words in a different language.<p>In more detail, there's an assertion and a proposed solution - and nothing to even remotely back up the assertion? Show me a page of Harry Potter in Spanish translated in this manner - I somewhat doubt it will make much sense.

There's some similar statistics for Japanese novels here: <a href="http://pomax.nihongoresources.com/index.php?entry=1223045359" rel="nofollow">http://pomax.nihongoresources.com/index.php?entry=1223045359</a> which I think show that the problem is not at the "most common" end of the distribution but at the "least common" end. The jump between '80% understanding' and '90% understanding' requires knowing an extra 5341 words, 90% to 95% needs another 7495, and so on. Basically the long tail is really nasty, and even 90% understanding is still not knowing one word in ten...

That's a fantastic idea. I'm struggling to learn Korean, and it's tough because few of the words are recognizable to me. I have a base of English/French/Russian, so that doesn't help (much).<p>I would love to try to put my grammar/flash cards aside and go the Harry Potter route.<p>I can't code. What could you do to help me, an average user, do this with Korean?

&#62;did you know that out of 5 most popular languages in the world, 3 of them are relatively easy to acquire? They are: English, Spanish and Russian, and my plan is to be fluent in English and Spanish and be able to get by with Russian by the end of 2013! Who’s with me?!)<p>I'll grant that Spanish is relatively easy but Russian is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn. It's hard for me to judge the difficulty of English but I wouldn't say it is an easy language.

I like HP series in this regard. Vocabulary complexity slightly increases with each book, which helps to progressively learn a language.

Reinventing Zipf's law, huh?

Nlp folks call those "stopwords," because they don't contribute much to statistical understanding of text. That is, in most nlp applications, those words are removed to leave more meaningful text behind. How did this make front page?

Linguality (<a href="http://www.linguality.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.linguality.com/</a>) prints French and Italian novels with the original text on the right pages and a page-specific mini-dictionary on the left pages. No need to keep stopping to look up words in a dictionary.<p>Unfortunately there are only a few Linguality books. Can you do this with an e-reader?

As a native russian speaker, I can say with utmost certainty that Russian is <i>NOT</i> the easiest language to learn. In fact, I would argue that it is somewhere on the upper scale of difficulty.<p>I have been living in North America only 10 years - and I can't even teach Russian to my own kids - we had to get a tutor.

Nice. Additional stemming would probably provide better data, however.