Hi Radim, Thanks so much for this. I’m trying to get started by loading the pretrained.bin files from the word2vec site ( freebase-vectors-skipgram1000.bin.gz). It loads fine, but when I run the most similar function. It cant find the words in the vocabulary. My error code is below. Windows 7 ripristino boot loader da cd di installazione. Any ideas where I’m going wrong? Hi, I’m pretty new to both machine learning and reddit so my apoligies if this topic is out of place, in the wrong subreddit, or not appropriate.
V the serial karan kundra episode. 'Ashk' is a story about the complex emotions of love. Fawad and Mehreen showcase the journey of one sided love as Rohail & Madiha. Their on-screen chemistry and camaraderie has enamoured audiences in Pakistan and India alike.
This semester, my professor has asked me to investigate word2vec, by T Milokov and his team at Google, and particularly with regards to machine translation. For this task, I’m using the implementation of word2vec in the gensim package for python. In the paper (link below) Milokov describes how after training two monolingual models, they generate a translation matrix on the most frequently occurring 5000 words, and using this translation matrix, evaluate the accuracy of the translations of the following 1000 words. Paper: Here are two screencaps, one of the description of the matrix in the paper and one of some clarification Milokov posted on a board. From paper: Milokov post: I have been playing around with the models I have generated for Japanese and English in gensim quite a bit. I downloaded wikipedia dumps, processed and tokenised them, and generated the models with gensim. I would like to emulate what Milokov did and see how accurate the translation are for Japanese/English (my two languages).
I am unsure how to get the top 6000 words (5000 for make the trans vector, 1000 for testing), and especially how to produce the vector. I have read the papers and seen the algorithms but can’t quite put it into code. If anyone has some ideas/suggestions on how to do so, provide some pseudocode or has gensim knowledge and can lend a hand it would be greatly appreciated. I’m very motivated for this task but having difficulty progressing.
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Benny, as an American who lived in Poland for eight years, it was fascinating to watch your first lesson in this devilishly difficult Slavic language. You learned more Polish in a couple hours than I did in 6 months! I arrived in Poland in 1992 not speaking a word of Polish, and with poor language learning skills. No one spoke English, so I was forced to learn very basic Polish words just for everyday activities. The stores back then were leftovers from the Communist era, meaning all items were behind a counter, and if you wanted something, you had to ask for it! I immediately learned how to say “Please” and “Yes.” Now I could point to things & say Please. This created dozens of interactions wherein the shop clerk, invariably female but not always in the best humor, would tap various items until I indicated by hand or other motions which item I needed.
This could be funny for a short time if there wasn’t much of a line, but got totally stressful if there was a big line behind me & everyone was waiting for the stupid foreigner to hurry up & buy his milk. I gradually picked up Polish in a slow motion version of your language learning technique. First, I learned the most important words, i.e. Numbers, foods, introductions, to be, to have. It was slow going, and for months my daily interaction with the Polish language was limited as I was an English teacher. But, I did interact while shopping.
I made lots of mistakes, and decided this didn’t bother me. If I learned 4 words, I’d try to string them together into a phrase, maybe someone would understand.
My only goal was speaking. I was surrounded by the language whenever I left the school, and slowly became attuned to the music of Polish. I practiced telling time by walking up to men on the street and saying “Excuse me, sir, what is the time, please?” Occasionally, I’d ask stupid questions of total strangers.
One night at a bus stop I asked a man if he liked Lech Walesa, Poland’s then President. With a scowl, he answered “I don’t know, I don’t know him.” I had an argument in 10 words at the local post office when I went to return a letter than was sent from abroad, but was addressed to someone else. Not my address, I kept repeating. To my astonishment, the postal clerk opened up the letter, took a quick look at the contents & threw it into a pile.
Shocked at this brazen disregard of privacy, I told everyone about the incident. The Americans were aghast, the Poles just shrugged, censorship had only been lifted a couple years earlier.
Getting back to language learning, after 2 years I decided to get serious about Polish & signed up for a year-long course designed to prepare foreign students to study at Polish universities. 6 years into my stay, I started translating contracts & legal opinions. I became a good translator focusing on tax & legal, but if the guys started talking about cars, I couldn’t follow the conversation as I took the bus. Your blog post has inspired me to get serious again about learning another language. This time I’ll try your method instead of the slow, haphazard process of my experience in Poland. My target language is Ukrainian – I’ll check back in a few months & let you know what I’ve accomplished.
Benny, this article was amazing! I came across it from Hacker News and it has truly inspired me to start back into language learning. I have always been very INTERESTED in language, and took 6 years of Spanish in school. I spent a week and a half in Peru back then where I could understand the gist of conversations around me, but froze up when trying to speak, like I was in Freshmen year Public Speakin class again.
Since those days of college my Spanish has deteriorated, but since reading this post a few days ago and taking notes on it and making lists of the different resource links, I am genuinely inspired and determined to have another go at it, with a different perspective, different methodolgy. Great article- You both give me hope for expanding my glotness! I wanted to throw a couple additional fun ways to practice language I’ve found: 1.) There are iPhone Apps by Mindsnacks that have numerous games in every edition that help you work on your vocab and phrases. I promise I have nothing to do with them, just enjoy using the Spanish one right now. 2.) Another awesome way I found to work on my Spanish is through dating sites. I knew I was going to Colombia for Christmas, so I joined a Colombian dating site. I could chat with the girls on the site in Spanish, and do quick “cut and paste” searches for translations before replying whenever I got lost (in translation ? ) Anyway, I got to chat with multiple beautiful women (they grow on trees in Colombia), and even went on a couple of dates once there.
My only regrets – not practicing Spanish and Salsa more before I got there. Can I also add, as one who has been pretty successful in running a business in SE Asia, that we shouldn’t forget that many clients NEED someone whose English is on-point. Many successful entrepreneurs there already know how to tap into the indigenous population (that’s why they’re successful!); however, reaching expats and younger generations, both of whom usually have a greater command of English, is a challenge.
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So, by all means, pick up a language, but don’t forget the power of Englishmost of Asia is only too eager to learn. Brilliant synopsis. I say do away with college language classes entirely and force students to study abroad.
2 hours with a single tutor in the morning and then — on your own to explore, meet people, stumble around, buy some beer or bread or a pair of pants, fall in love (for a week or two max), and just get that lumpy gravy brain feeling down. One day you’ll be dreaming in the other language and then you know your brain has added the extra channel. Used to take me a few months, but now two to three weeks depending how patient the locals are with my incoherent ramblings and questions. Hey, this is a really cool post, it’s given me some great ideas on how to improve my own language learning! Some of the simple things, like just getting TuneIn radio, makes accessing foreign language speakers a lot easier. One thing I would say is that where you have written about cognates, there is a key element behind that, and that is being well read in various different types of writing, both in your own language and foreign languages.
Having a large English vocabulary makes spotting cognates in other languages so much easier, as it is easier to compare the stems of the words and thus produce that link. I wrote a little about that on our blog recently-check ou the link above and then click blog if you are interested. Once again, awesome blog! Agreed – I almost exclusively use my own Anki decks when I’m intensively learning a language.
Usually I find someone on oDesk who is affordable, train them in how it’s done, and they create the decks for me based on my notes of what I’ve learned that week. In the last three projects (Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin), I hired a native speaker who added in audio of them speaking the word/phrase too. Well worth the investment! In this case, the content of the publicly available decks is irrelevant.
However, different people have different ways of learning. For example, my friend ( a ploygot) learns languages by listening to music. He learns all the vocabulary from the lyrics. He uses the lyric approach to learning, only after he has learned the grammar basic of the target language. He also goes out of his way to chat with native speakers early on. I find myself using textbooks to learn along with television programs and language journals. I only chat with native speakers after I have acquired a certain skill level.
The key to language learning is about how much time you are willing to spend with the language. Listening to the language daily is especially important to building comprehension. What a insightful Article! Benny you are really a language genius! Here I also want to share a few tips for learning Mandarin Chinese: 1. I’ve been learning Chinese for almost a year now.
I had tried stuff like Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur etc., unfortunately they didn’t work out for me. Until I found a online Skype tutor Moderator: Link Removed, I started to feel I’m learning something. They are really professional and patient! The rate is also reasonable, so just check it out! For me, I’m studying 30 minutes to one hour a day depending on how busy my schedule is, which includes twice a week one hour online tutoring with my tutor. Also I found self-made flashcards extremely helpful to my learning. My teacher also told me vocabulary building is the key to learning a language well.
Since Chinese is a pictograph language, she helped building my vocabulary by adapting the radical-teaching approach, in which she introduced different parts(radicals) of a character to help understanding as well as memorizing. Research shows that with 1200 Chinese characters will cover 90% of understanding.
This is quite an interesting topic. I am a teacher of English as a second language and I have learned to speak 4 languages fluently (Russian, English, Spanish and Hebrew). The latest language I learned was Spanish and I learned it while I was taking a teacher’s training course. Some of the advice here I completely back up, like for example when it comes to finding opportunities to practice with native speakers in language clubs and on Skype.
But there is an element that is missing in all of this and that’s the functionality of the language that you’re actually learning. Will I be understood?
Will people understand me? One of the things I teach my students when I teach English is not just grammar and vocabulary but also how speakers can make what they say to mean what they want it to mean. That is, how what they say will actually be interpreted and how they can use grammar and vocabulary to come across the way they want. As far as my own experience with learning Spanish, that kind of language teaching is incredibly difficult to come. I live in Spain and I have become fluent in Spanish in about 8 months (building on the 16 months that I spent learning prior to that). Most of the people I meet for language exchange purposes are seriously baffled by the kind of questions and observations I make about accurate expression. They are baffled, because they’ve never noticed such important details because no one pointed them out to them before.
My conclusion is that, unfortunately, it does take a lot of lost time and searching effort to find what you need in order to improve effective communication. That is, unless you come across a good teacher. There is nothing that can replace that.
Fortunately, sometimes that person can sometimes be your own self. In my case, even though my teaching training didn’t teach me Spanish directly, they influenced the methods I was using to teach myself. Take that a step further, what interests me, is how effective you have found your method to be. My measure for effective communication is how easy/difficult it is to get. In terms of my experience, I always want to know why in certain situations, while not using any expressions or terms I don’t know, native speakers of Spanish can get by in a given situation with much less difficulty than I can (and visa versa with English and Russian, in both of which I am perfectly bilingual). Question to Mr.
Benny Lewis (and Tim Ferris? Not sure who the authors are here): What is your measure for how effective your language learning method is? To what degree have you tested you language learning skills? And what difficulties have you come across as far as actually being to take the languages that you’ve learned and make them functional, effective, and get you the communication results that you want?
Have you ever actually taught any languages? That is, are there any students for whom you have taken the responsibility of teaching? (If you have, how has your experience been and which of the pieces of advice above did you find to be most useful?) Lastly, to the authors, being polyglots have you learned any of the languages I speak fluently as a second language? Would you mind having a brief conversation with me over Skype in that language? I hate the polys;)))) Had a client once who was a Turkish jew – Hebrew on the phone with his father, Turkish on the other phone with his brother, Italian with his Italian secretary in Geneva, French with the client and English with me – but all in one breath;)))) All was well until an East German turned up – who had no English but German and Russian – oh and Serbian electrical team Now off to learn mandarin;))) – there are a dozen or so speakers nearby, and Beijing is obvious ‘common’ word other than gwialo Like. Very interesting read as always. My better half is Argentinian and speaks english like a native.
Was amusing on our last holiday in Bariloche, people would hear her speak to me in english, then in spanish to her mother and comment on how good her spanish was. It is amazing how some can become flawless in the acquired language and yet others can still have strong accents even after 20 years in a country. Looking forward to your upcoming guest post with Gabe, he has been doing some very interesting stuff also. Great summary!
Thanks, Tim and Benny! I can recommend a language learning method developed by Vera F. Birkenbihl which uses passive listening and is very helpful for getting the language melody right.
Here a brief summary: In German, there is also a highly recommendable short book by her with lots of helpful tips called “Sprachen lernen leicht gemacht”. I speak six foreign languages, 2 C, 2 B and 2 A. Next goal is to learn Bangla as I am doing a research project in Bangladesh. If anyone has particular advice on this, let me know! Cheers, Sabine Like.
I really enjoyed your post and I truly believe that the most important things is to go through the breaking point. Before that you are insecure and afraid to speak. Everyone finds his own breaking point, after you go through that stage (hopefully fast) you will start learning much faster and effective. I am speaking Mandarin now.
Went through my breaking point thanks to my girlfriend who doesn’t speak English. I am also using flashcards to memorize vocabulary and try to make sentences with the new words asap instead of writing them down over and over again. Any recommendations about Flashcard apps except Anki? If you want to learn Bulgarian you can send me email ? Great job.
Thanks for the info? One thing that helped me immensely to not mix up my German and Dutch was to buy a book.in German. ABOUT Dutch. We call this “laddering”, and it’s an effective way to compartmentalize 2 languages – by using both at the same time in a way. By doing this the source language teaching book is also more effective in pointing out the differences between that 2nd language and your third language, without involving your first language. Rather than saying you “lost” your German, think of it as just needing the rust removed ? Hope that helps – best of luck! I am one of those people who is almost overwhelmed at the idea of learning a new language.
I currently speak English only and am trying to learn Italian, which is embarrassing as everyone tells me its one of the easiest to learn. I’m totally freaked out at the complexity created from the concept of masculine and feminine and conjugations etc. I started trying to learn the grammar rules and it just seemed so difficult it shook my confidence at ever being able to master it. The number of words are so much greater than English depending on who you are speaking to and what you are speaking about. I’m really encouraged by this blog though especially by the idea that you really only need to learn about 300 or so words for most conversations. I’m wondering if a good way to approach it is to start with mixed language sentences ie use Italian words if I know them and English words where I don’t know the Italian. I notice a lot of bilingual speakers even when fluent speak to each other this way, or is this a bad approach for a learner?
I think the main reason adults don’t learn as well is the fear and embarrassment factor that kids don’t think about. Sometimes I think English as a native language is a curse as its so easy to get away with no other language but I agree its not the same and I hate relying on others to speak my language. Benny, I have just spent 2 months travelling across South America and so have picked up some of the basics, greetings, ordering food at a restaurant, asking for the bill and so on. However, I don’t feel like I could hold a conversation with a native Spanish speaker for more than 30 seconds to a minute, let alone an hour. Would you still recommend finding a native speaker to speak to online for an hour straight away or try to learn some more first?
I don’t feel like speaking to someone just yet would be of benefit but if you say I should, even after this comment, I’ll get to it straight away. I want to become conversational and then fluent so badly! The child’s brain changes dramatically in the transition from first-language acquisition and second-language acquisition; it is very important when discussing this subject not to conflate the twin stages which comprise First-language acquisition and second-language acquisition.
I did listen to the article and read it and I would have left it at that but I was moved to comment as I found it full of bad science and wild assertions that would be good for selling a book but not so for an adult who is truthfully looking for scientifically based studies that deals with second-language acquisition and doesn’t just lump the two stages together and ignores all the peer-reviewed scientific data. The author also created some straw-man arguments, for example when he asserted that adults are better at learning languages than infants! But an adult is also better at dressing himself up as an Egyptian in sandals and fez and going to Egypt to learn Arabic but I would contest that this is costly and time consuming compared to the infant sitting in his high-chair, cosy in his Pampers nappy, drinking from her Tommy Teeppy mug not making the least effort to learn but learning all the same his/her mother tongue in spite of herself! It would have been useful and helpful if the author had even mentioned in passing the vast amount of scientific data and peer-reviewed studies that have been made in the study of first-language and second-language acquisition but that is not in the purview of snake-oil salesmen. The posts in this blog by Scott are worth a read and supply many good sources to get an unbiased look at the topic.
If in his blog Benny had made some caveats saying that learning a language does require a lot of effort and motivation it would have been more honest. Most of us do not have the time or money to go gallivanting around the world learning languages.
To become very proficient in a second language (speaking, reading and writing) takes years not months. Asking for a coffee and croissant is pretty easy but Banny’s blog is not addressing that; he uses examples that pretend to say that you could be acting as an interpreter in Spain in a few months; I notice that now Benny does not advocate going to a foreign country to get immersed in the culture. Did your publisher have a word in your ear about that Benny? Less of that snake-oil salesman pitch Benny son! Some of you maybe thinking that I am a disgruntled second-language learner drop-out but let me say that I that would be far from the truth. I was born in Brazil so my mother tongue is Portuguese. At he age of three I and my sister (4) were adopted by a Scotsman who spoke English of course and had a smattering of Spanish.
Even after a few months my sister and I were translating from English to Portuguese and vice versa with consummate ease and fluency. We lived in Scotland for a couple of years and after that were even more fluent. An adult would not have learned as quickly as we did.
Because we were still at the first-language acquisition stage. Read the peer-reviewed science on the topic. We then moved back to South America and lived in Peru (I was seven years old) for two years.
Lo and behold I became fluent in Spanish with the vocabulary and reading skill of a seven-year old. It was also at this time that I first learned how to read English from the King James Version of the Bible (Elizabethan English!) as that was the only book in the house. We went to live in Scotland when I was ten and at school I learned French for the first time and also did Spanish when I was thirteen. Should I mention the six years of Latin? It was taught the same way French and any other language was taught, badly! All written or read and seldom spoken!
I did Modern Languages at university and became a Modern Languages teacher. I spent a year teaching in France and became fluent for the first time. Ten years into my teaching I retrained in Computing Science and went on to teach it for twenty years learning five more languages; Pascal, BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, Visual Basic, COMAL and HTML, LOGO, Machine Code and LISP.
So I can claim knowledge and fluency in fourteen languages! What do you mean I can’t count them? They have their own rules of grammar and syntax and if you say as much you don’t know what you’re talking about it. I wrote a programming book for students so I know what I am talking about – and it was peer-reviewed, ha ha!
I have been living in Spain for going on ten years and although fluent I learn something new everyday. I’ll leave it there. I hope I have not been too harsh on Benny. He means well and I am sure he will give lots of you hope and motivation to learn a new foreign language.
It will not be easy but it will be a load of fun and much of his advice and tips will prove useful. Buy his book! He needs to live but remember the caveats I have made, especially those to do with time required and do read the science of second-language acquisition and by no mans confuse and conflate it with first-language acquisition of infants!
Really Benny you of all people should know better. Of course, this doesn’t provide much help to those trying to learn a rare or a constructed language. Lojban, which is what is my goal to learn, is both. The #1 tip probably works for Lojban also. However, I’ve noticed that many use compound words, lujvos, also, and those confuse me since they aren’t found directly in a word list. Well, maybe if I read about them more I’d begin to understand how they work.
Tip #2 doesn’t work all that well since it’s a language made from pretty much scratch. Tip #3 doesn’t work well either since it’s not a natural language and therefore not spoken in a single place.
Furthermore, there’s little media written or spoken in it. Tip #4 might work. I’m a bit scared to really try it out, though. Also, there are no native Lojban speakers and only a handful of fluent speakers.
Tip #5 works somewhat. I know at least that Memrise has a fair amount of basic learning material for Lojban. #6 Not actually a tip but still that’s new information for me and good to hear. #7-#9 should work more or less well. (Yeah, very descriptive.) I learned the basics of English in school and advanced my knowledge among by watching movies amongst other media. However, it’s a very rare thing that Lojban is taught in any school and there isn’t that much media that features Lojban.
Overall, learning Lojban is just a very daunting task because there are just so few options for how to learn it. I still feel it would be nice since it’s such a wonderful language technically. Thanks a Lot for these Great Tips Benny ❤ I really Love learning new languages and i'm pretty sure that these tips are going to be really Helpful in my process of learning, For the last month, i've been trying to learn Korean as i loved the language from listnening to it from the K-Dramas, and i've got to say that it had been really useful for me to learn many vocabulary words 'only' from watching the Korean Dramas and taking notes for them, and right now as i'm having my class 12 Final Exams, i'll make sure to consider your great tips after i finish my exams, Thanks Again =D Like. Hola, Merhaba, こんにちは, Hi there. So, I hope you’re still reading these comments!
If not, I suppose I’ll try email But I want to know – how do you keep up multiple languages at the same time? I really respect both your opinions. Do you put the others on hold to focus on the new one (that’s what I’m doing now)? For how long? Do you do 3 months on, switch back to 3 months of another, and switch back again?
Or do you keep the others up a little bit the whole time? What’s best practice? I studied Japanese at school, uni, and eventually went on to become a Japanese teacher. But since I left my teaching job, I haven’t spoken a word of Japanese. Instead, I’ve spent time in Spain and studied Spanish, and just recently, moved to Turkey, where I discovered this blog post and have been using your approach (Benny), and Anki (WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE!?) to teach myself Turkish. So far, much success. (Just quietly, you’ve changed my hobby-life).
(There was a bit of Arrente in there somewhere as well, an Australian Aboriginal language, but I didn’t get far due to minimal effort. So many languages, so little time). I’m a language lover. Nothing gets me as (mentally) excited as conjugating verbs. Freak, I know. I talk to myself in different languages while I do the housework and walk through the streets.
Yeah, I get looks. But it’s a life long passion for me. Anyway, you get the picture.
I love language study, and your post has me super interested in how I can keep learning more and pick up new ones in the fastest, most effective way. An extra note I actually feel ashamed I didn’t know your approach earlier. As a Japanese teacher, I was teaching students the old school way. I even worked in a language centre with 12 other language teachers (between us we taught 6 different languages) but no one knew this approach.
The work you do is important, Benny. Please keep spreading the word. お返事お待ちしております。 ジョディ Like.