![]() Is there a magic method to learning a language? No – I don’t think so.īut there is something that will definitely make learning languages easier – immersion. Some things worked, some things didn’t work, and some things were a waste of time and money. I’ve tried a lot of different things over the past six years. I’ve written Japanese diaries listened to Japanese music watched Japanese movies and TV shows and downloaded Japanese podcasts. I’ve used language exchange apps and attended in person language exchanges – in Japan and in the UK. I’ve taken Japanese classes – free ones from a community centre, private 1-1 classes with a tutor, private classes online, professional group classes in London, and university classes at Waseda University in Tokyo. I’ve signed up to apps – one app I forgot I subscribed to until they charged me hundreds of dollars a few months ago. I’ve bought textbooks – on grammar, exam preparation, vocabulary, reading comprehension, sayings, onomatopoeia (sounds that become words), the Japanese alphabet, and writing practice. I’ve tried a lot of different things to learn Japanese (and Chinese… but let’s stick with Japanese today). Is this really the case? For some people – maybe? But for most of us, we are not so lucky! ![]() Language learning apps or online courses, for example, will tell you that you can become fluent in just 30 days or with only a few minutes of study every day. People and companies always try to sell you this dream. ![]() We all want a method that will magically speed up the English process – to go from nothing to everything with the least amount of effort possible. I’ve been studying Japanese on and off for over six years now and I’ve struggled with motivation and gaining enough vocabulary to become a truly advanced speaker. And the truth is… I wish I knew the answer. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).People always ask me the best way to learn English quickly. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), and express.js.Ĭurrently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.įinally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. ![]() ![]() Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. ![]()
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