Author Topic: Word lists seem too long  (Read 8670 times)

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PaulGall

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Word lists seem too long
« on: January 01, 2008, 04:10:18 PM »
First let me say I think Stackz is great. I love it.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it seems like many of the word lists are too long. When I am using LEARN mode, it can take several hours to go through a 300-400 word list, so I rarely ever finish. Some of the Japanese lists have more than 1000 words in each file. So then when I go back to the list, I have to go over the same words.

Seems like it would be easier (for me anyway), to have smaller word lists, of say 50 words. Since there are thousands of people using this program, and I don't see any other complaints about this, I have a feeling I'm doing something wrong, or don't understand something about it. Could someone shed a little light or advice on this?

Thanks!

napurenon

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Re: Word lists seem too long
« Reply #1 on: January 01, 2008, 05:52:50 PM »
I think the file should be divided up into lessons of about 50 words each. Maybe by mistake you are learning the whole file instead of only one lesson of it? Which word lists are you using?

PaulGall

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Re: Word lists seem too long
« Reply #2 on: January 01, 2008, 09:42:05 PM »
For example, file Grade2.szm has about 400-600 words per lesson. There are 9 lessons, total of 3791 cards.

gigapops

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Re: Word lists seem too long
« Reply #3 on: January 02, 2008, 05:30:16 AM »
My wordlist size:
I chose a size of around 1000 words with 10 lessons of 100 words each.
I set the Maximum Local Stack Elements at 100.
In 'learn dialog' I can see all of the words in a lesson on the left side of screen.
I have downloaded some very large word lists of 25000 or more and then cut them down to 1000. That is 25 word lists of 1000 words each.
To cut a 10000 word list I open a 'working' folder and fill it with empty files like this:
word list 1.smz
word list 2.smz
word list 3.smz
word list 4.smz
word list 5.smz
word list 6.smz
word list 7.smz
word list 8.smz
word list 9.smz
word list 10.smz
TOP-HALF.smz
BOTTEM-HALF.smz
...............................
I save the big file to be cut to both the 'top half'.smz and to the 'bottom half'.smz, then start deleting, watching the the word counter.
In top half, start deleting at the bottom. In bottem half, start deleting at the top. The remaining 5000 from top half are saved to word lists 5 and 4. the remaining 5000 from bottom half are saved to word lists 10 and 9.
Continue deleting from word lists 5-4-10-9 etc. saving to the next word list.
Use the same procedure to reduce 1000 to 100.
gigapops

davecazz

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Re: Word lists seem too long
« Reply #4 on: January 03, 2008, 03:46:14 AM »
by the way, those Joyo Kanji lists are pretty ambitious. They do not reflect the normal number of words in each list. I would start off with a kanji in context list, or go through and weed out some words from the Joyo lists. Those lists are basically all the Joyo Kanji, in order, with all the common use words for each kanji. you'll spend a year learning all the words for the first 300 kanji that way. learning all ~2000 standard kanji with 3-5 sample uses each is probably a little more doable.

by the way, as far as word count goes, 50 is probably a good place to start but if you push yourself, you can go up to 100 or more per list.

PaulGall

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Re: Word lists seem too long
« Reply #5 on: January 05, 2008, 02:55:22 AM »
Seems like I was right, that the lists were too large. I guess there are a few different ways to shrink them down to multiple files. I might just keep them in one file, but split it into many lessons.

I don't understand though, how you can see 100 words in a list? You must be using a very small font, or have a large monitor. I can only see about 50 at the left.

gigapops

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Re: Word lists seem too long
« Reply #6 on: January 05, 2008, 05:26:36 PM »
Yes, only about 20 words are visible on the screen at any one time. To see all 100, set Maximum local elements to 100, select 'Initialize local stack directly' then 'Detailed local stack', use the scroll bar to see all. In 'Match dialog' it will automatically scroll to find a match.
gigapops
« Last Edit: January 05, 2008, 05:53:50 PM by gigapops »

 

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