I’ve been doing a category called “The Essentials” in Spanish from English, but today I find it’s missing. My sentences that I had favorited from it are also missing. Is this a new change? Would have been nice to have a notification about it or a blog post or something, since it seems like a big change (it was first on the list, above fluency fast track, so I assumed I should be doing it first, and was nearly done when it disappeared).
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It should be back now, sorry about that. Curious to hear if you have any feedback on the Essentials collection, we’re trying to decide whether a smaller, more curated version of the Fast Track or the Essentials should be the default initial/recommended collection.
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Thanks! And I’m not really sure, I do think that overall there are too many sentences total (Like counting all the categories, there’s what, 100,000 sentences? That’s longer than an encyclopedia. I can’t imagine how many decades it’d take to master them all, even if you spend hours a day doing them), but I think removing people’s sentences after they have been working on them is a bad idea.
I think the main problem is that you treat each different conjugation of a word as a separate word, when really they are the same word. That does have some advantages (since, for example, fui doesn’t look anything like ir, yendo, ido, vas, etc., yet those are all the same word in Spanish, so treating them as different words may make all the different-looking conjugations feel more familiar) but it also means that you are treating, for example, words that are almost the same but differ by one letter as two different words, which leads to an inordinate amount of words, a lot of which are redundant to learn (if you know what médico, you probably also know what médica is, and don’t need to learn each one). I’m not sure there’s a good solution to that.
The main thing I’d like to see is more themed collections, rather than everything being by frequency. For instance, a collection just for animals and plants. Or one just for various food items. Or one for science terms, or household items (furniture, kitchen items, types of clothing, whatever). Like grouped vocabulary by topic, rather than everything being in one giant ‘these are the words that are 10,000-20,000 in order of frequency’, which feels random to learn. So if someone wanted to learn all the words for colors, or all the words for family relationships (aunt, cousin, nephew, etc.) they could get a sense of accomplishment from having mastered smaller categories like that.
I’m not sure the frequency lists that are like 40,000-50,000 are ever going to be used by most people because by the time someone gets there (they are so far down on the list), they’d have to have spent years on the site. And a lot of those rarer words are largely long adverbs that mean almost the same thing in English anyway (due to English taking so many words from French, another romance language, the rarer a word, the more likely it is it’s similar in English and Spanish, it’s the more common words that differ the most and those are the ones people need practice with. We already know that meticulosamente probably means meticulously, for example. So removing the extremely obvious words might be a good start if you want to remove sentences.) The use of frequency is to learn the most common words first, to make communication easier. But what is the use of specifically learning the rarer words, in order of frequency? I can’t see any good reason someone would want to learn words 35,000 to 40,000 on a frequency list. The first 1k, 2k, or 5k, sure. But the usefulness of frequency doesn’t matter when it gets into the tens of thousands.
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