Tuesday, August 2, 2016

5000 German Sentences Sorted from Easiest to Hardest

Here's how this list was made: 1) I grabbed a list with the 4000 most frequently used German words -- sorted from the most frequently used, to the least. 2) I grabbed 60 000 translated german sentences from the internet (no longer than 6 words) 3) I wrote a program that assigns a Frequency Rank Number to each word from every sentence, this Frequency Rank Number based on the list mentioned on item "1)" 4) This program calculates the average value of the all the words' Frequency Rank Numbers. And assigns this value to the sentence. The result is that if a sentence contains advanced words, the sentence will have a high Average Frequency Rank Number. If a sentence contains only beginner words, the AFRN will be low. 5) Finally, I sorted the sentences: from the ones with the lowest AFRN, to the highest. The end result is that this list begins with very, very simple sentences, and new words get slowly introduced as you progress.


The best part is, an expanded version of this list(with audio!) is available for you to study on the learning software Anki:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/785874566
For free, of course.

If you don't have Anki, you can download here: http://ankisrs.net/


To view in a big screen, click the "See Original" button.


These sentences can be studied on the learning software Anki:
For free, of course.

If you do not have Anki, you can download it here:

8 comments:

  1. Hello! Thank you for organizing this list.

    Are these sentences from Tatoeba?

    Where did you get the audio? Are they generated by a software?

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, from Tatoeba; I programmed some stuff to generate the audio for me; and yes the audio generated by text-to-speech software.


      Some software for text-to-speech sounds awkward, but I used one with natural sounding voice, as you will see if you download the deck. Cheers~

      Delete
  2. The link is dead now (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1589023416), where can it be found now?

    Cheers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi! Use this link in the meantime:

      https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1013703822

      Delete
  3. Hi!

    Would it be possible to add the audio for both sentences?
    Then you could use this deck to learn english as a german speaker.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Many people who come to this blog are english teachers in non-english countries, who use the decks to teach English.

      Hmmmmm that would be a neat idea. Definitely going to do this.

      Delete
  4. Could you provide the deck as a text only file?
    I could put this into my own speech synthesis program,
    and I could also create my own program to display the deck.

    Also, perhaps average frequency per sentence is not the best measure, another measure to consider might be the lowest frequency word that appears in a sentence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. >"Could you provide the deck as a text only file?
      I could put this into my own speech synthesis program,
      and I could also create my own program to display the deck."

      Go to computer-version of anki, click on the "config" button beside the deck, "export", "export as..." then choose what format you want the text.

      >"Also, perhaps average frequency per sentence is not the best measure, another measure to consider might be the lowest frequency word that appears in a sentence."

      Sounds like a great idea! It requires a really big collection of sentences, but it can be done. I'll try it out.

      Delete