3 comments

  • willmorrison 11 hours ago ago

    I'm building a Japanese study app on anime and drama subtitles, and having the subtitle library made this cheap to count.

    Every line is split into dictionary words. The 2,000 most-common-word frequency list is created by looking at 6,000 titles, each weighted equally. A show's score is the share of its words that fall in that set. Character names are removed using each season's cast list.

    If you want to talk about language learning let me know at will@<the domain I linked to>! I love talking about this stuff.

    • zahlman 11 hours ago ago

      Interesting, but what do you propose to do with the result? This is at best a quite crude proxy for the difficulty of understanding the text.

      • willmorrison 10 hours ago ago

        You can see generally what I'm planning at the homepage https://etoku.app/

        The idea is that people can select goals and they'll be fed sentences from the broader corpus (and occasionally from exactly what they select) that teach them one concept in pursuit of understanding that goal.

        I agree that it's a crude proxy. Language learning has so many facets and, even if you know 100% of the grammar concepts and vocabulary in a work, you won't be able to understand a single sentence unless you've developed a good ear for the language. I think that teaching via native sentences with audio and a screenshot helps with this, but it's no substitute for true immersion.