Well, I have determined that I can understand nearly 100% of what is said in my classes. I am not lacking math or computer vocabulary. The required vocab is probably less than a 1000 words for each class. I don't normally take a lot of class notes (as the notes are often just a copy of the book anyway), but I always have a notebook and pen ready to write down words I don't understand. During the first week I wrote down about 200 words. During the second, that dropped to around 50. I expect it to continue to drop until it hits around 20 per week. That's all fine and dandy because then it's easy to understand.
However, people on the street still use words I don't understand. I am in Germany and this is my perfect chance to learn German, so I have set out on a new experiment. At the moment, I have my computer listening in on 5 chat room conversations. After a period of chatting, I copy the conversation onto a text program (so far I have 25 pages of 8-point meaningless conversation). Then after collecting a couple hundred pages of conversation, I will save the file onto my camera and transfer it to my computer. On my computer I wrote a program which extracts every word from the conversation, then it builds a database showing how often each word was used. I then sort it from the most common to the least common, and translate the words I don't know.
I'll probably learn a lot of slang that I wish I never knew. But I probably will create a list of really useful words (well, the list will probably also have a few thousand meaningless screen names, but those will be easy to detect and delete).
I'll let you know the results later.
-Mikel (that is the German spelling of my name. I've spelled my name "Mike" a few times, which would not be a German spelling at all, and a couple of my friends changed that to "Michael" by tossing an "l" on the end. I have cool friends).
Archived comments:
Paula:
Hey, at least if you learn slang, you will know when someone is insulting you, and you won't just smile and look stupid.
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