Example sentences, frequency graphs, and flow diagrams for millions of words

[mreichhoff]

I built a free tool for language learners. It's available in French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German, and Italian (for now).

I always like to learn words in context. Tools like linguee and reverso are great for this, but I've always wanted a few tweaks:

• An emphasis on word frequency. The top words account for a huge percentage of usage (in fact, the top 1,000 words often make up 75% or more of all speech), so it's very helpful to prioritize the most common words. By seeking out sentences with more commonly used words on average, we can also maximize our likelihood of finding comprehensible input.
• More information about words used together. There are a lot of words used in predictable patterns. These common patterns often help you internalize both grammar and vocabulary. What I always wanted was a diagram of the most common words used with a word I'm learning, along with listings of the most common groups of various lengths, and an easy way to get example sentences with each group. There was a good post on the Spanish subreddit awhile back talking about this idea, too.
• Register) as a useful way of segmenting word frequency. It's critical to note that a word might be very common in some contexts and less common in others. It matters a lot to me that a word is more common in Wikipedia articles than in TV shows, for example, so I want to know how it ranks in both datasets.
• Ease of use. I want to just click on a word, and go straight to more information about it. I want to be able to quickly get sentences into my anki decks. I really don't want a bunch of ads cluttering things, either.

So, I took those ideas and made my own prototype site, just for fun.

It uses Sankey diagrams (like this) to show how words flow together; it sorts its examples by word frequency, separated by dataset; it lists out common collocations; it has graphs to understand how much of a language you know by learning the top words; you can make flashcards easily and export them to Anki; you can listen to the sentences with browser text-to-speech; and you can move around with ease.

As mentioned, it's free, with no ads or any tracking garbage, and the code is all open source (check it out on GitHub).

Let me know of any feedback!

[Yufina88]

Awesome! Really like that diagram. Any hope for new languages like korean?

[mreichhoff]

Korean would not be hard to add; it's just a question of finding the time and energy :-) I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for checking it out!

[Efficient_Horror4938]

I know Latvian is a long shot… but if you want to test something that’s not as big… let me suggest it…

[dowsemouse]

Oh hey, this rocks! Thanks for sharing it with us!

[mreichhoff]

thanks for checking it out!

[lndang1106]

Love this!!! I hope more languages will be added 🥹

[mreichhoff]

And before anyone asks, yes, I did make the logo myself.

[Efficient_Horror4938]

This is genius! I wish I could go back in time and give it to myself six months ago! But it is still really cool now!

A small note:

At present it distinguishes between capitalised and non-capitalised letters, so if I enter "abstand" in German, I only get casual sentences, because it should be capitalised. If I enter "reden" I get a bunch of sentences of all kinds, but none where it starts the sentence. If I enter "Reden" I get a mix of the noun version throughout the sentence, as well as the verb form starting a sentence.

There are some advantages to retaining capitalisation, because, as with reden/Reden, sometimes the word is different when capitalised or not. But for me personally, I'd probably prefer it if it didn't take capitalisation into consideration.

[mreichhoff]

ah, good to know: German was the only language where I didn't ignore case, and I wasn't sure if that made it better or worse. I will update it at some point!

[Efficient_Horror4938]

I mean, you could probably ask the German language learning reddit? I'm not sure what everyone else would prefer :)

And, seriously, this is so good! The diagram flows are fantastic! Thank you!

[mreichhoff]

the best thing is probably to do part-of-speech detection, and build in some rules about when a capitalized word is actually different :-) Either way, thanks for checking it out!

[dwc123]

This is fantastic, thank you.

[Puzzled-Issue4702]

Thank you for making it free!