[Course Forum] Dutch - The 1,001 Most Common Words

Is there a possibility to contribute to the course?
It has a nice beginner set of words, but there are a lot of inconsistencies and other problems, which I am volunteering to fix.

1 Like

Asking @Lien is a good idea (by putting the @ before her username she has been informed). She usually helps with stuff like that.

1 Like

maybe you should first try to contact the author? (in this case @seeirwin definitely not in these fora, howeverā€¦ please edit your first message by adding the link)

if you have sufficient knowledge of Dutch to make corrections: take into account that any changes (and we speak here about an ā€œoldā€ course with a huge number of users) affects the progress/etc of the user

If a new course contributor improves a course, then this can only have a positive impact on the progress made by a learner doing the course in the long-term, even if there might be short-term frustrations over realising that a translation that was previously accepted is now deemed to be wrong.

But any serious language learner will get over this quickly, I would hope.

of course, with accent on ā€œimproveā€

Hi @VictorAgababov,
Thanks for your kind offer to help improve this course.
Fellow learner @V75 is already an editor for the course and has made a range of valuable contributions.
As 1,001 words is quite a lot to manage for an individual, he/she may welcome your help?

@V75, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this :slight_smile:
(you can reply here or by messaging me privately)

Thanks!

Lien

1 Like

Sure. I am ready to work with whoever else is there :slight_smile:
My suggestions mostly revolve around consistency and presentation.

Thanks.

Hi Lien,

Iā€™m wondering what improvements are intended???

The course has been going for a long time and as far as I know without any recent difficulties. (DaftShadow did the initial hard graft and then Awrowhh and I have made a lot of changes to deal with synonyms and other problems).

I think there is a risk of making changes that will throw a lot of peopleā€™s learning out. If there were problems, they would surely emerge by now. There were a lot of people in those early days who were quick to point to difficulties. Robert Alexander in particular.

My instincts tell me to find out more about these changes and inconsistencies.

Awrowhh and I spent a lot of time devising approaches for both this course and the second thousand!!! We tried hard to be consistent.

I donā€™t want to be ā€œpreciousā€ but Iā€™m aware of people who start a course and then want to change it!!!

Iā€™m interested in what you decide.

Nice to hear from you though. Memrise has taken a back seat through a difficult year. But Iā€™m back in Holland for the summer and need to get my Dutch back up to speed. With Memrise naturally.

I hope all is well with you.

Best,

Diana. (V75)

1 Like

Hoi Diana,

Fijn om van je te horen! Hopelijk een zonnige zomer daar in Nederland?

Daar jij je al zo lang over deze cursus ontfermt, laat ik beslissingen hier omtrent graag over aan jou.
Volgens wat ik uit @VictorAgababov 's bericht kan opmaken, gaat het voornamelijk om inconsistenties.
@VictorAgababov , can you elaborate on these inconsistencies so we can look into it further?

Groetjes!

Lien

1 Like

As I said, mostly presentation.
Well, an example would be simple word dag. For some reason, being a noun it lacks the article in presentation. And there quite a few of those like this.
The course contains 3 words for mother (ma, mam and moeder) and when passing in browser itā€™s impossible to know which one it is (and alternatives are not accepted in some combinations + in multiple answer they happen together which is even more confusing).
HTH.

Iā€™m surprised as I would expect these things to have been picked up long ago. The original course didnā€™t have articles, but they were added when DaftShadow took over curating the course. Awrowhh and I did a lot on synonyms.

People were very quick to indicate the gaps both in articles and with synonyms and a lot of work was done at this time.

But Iā€™ll check the data base.

I am on a boat at the moment (Iā€™m sailing in Holland for the summer) and canā€™t access the data base via a mobile. Iā€™ll check it when I next have access to a laptop.

1 Like

There are tons of other items with questionable value, like inflected adjectives (jong -> jonge; geweldig -> geweldige ā€“ this one is even worse, since the definitions differ).

This course was based on a frequency study. It has worked well for a very large number of beginners. The original forum is unfortunately not available anymore so you arenā€™t able to see how the course changed to meet learners needs.

I donā€™t think it will help learners who have completed it but still ā€œwaterā€ it, if there are suddenly a lot of changes. It has been very settled for a very long time. So I think the vast majority of people are happy with it.

Why donā€™t you find another course that may suit you better? Memriseā€™s own courses are excellent.

But thank you for the offer.

1 Like

This feels quite passive aggressive from your part (I can decide for myself which course I want to follow or not) and, honestly, disappointing.
As I said earlier, there are gaps and inconsistencies and showed you some. I never suggested a lot of changes.
But, whatever suits you better ā€“ if you donā€™t want to improve it ā€“ your choice.
Have fun sailing.

Oops. I didnā€™t mean to be patronising. Letā€™s just get on with enjoying learning Dutch.

1 Like

For all of you who have studied this excellent courseā€¦

ā€¦and now want to add some more words based on subtitle frequency such as presented in the excellent ā€œDutch - The 1,001 Most Common Wordsā€ and ā€œDutch - The 1,002 to 2,002 Most Common Wordsā€ but are worried about the unnecessary shared entries (duplicates) of these three courses, thereā€™s a new kid in town:

This course lists the 1400 most common words in subtitles (based on the very same University of Ghent data) that are not yet to be found in the 5,000 words course. It should also list all words unique to both the ā€œ1,001ā€ and ā€œ1,002 to 2,002ā€ course. Both courses (+5000 & 1400) cover (at least) the 5000 most frequent words in subtitles. Please see level 1 (syllabus) of this course or consult the forum for more background information.

Forum: [Course Forum] 6500 most frequent Dutch words with Audio

1 Like

Level 3

The word naar could be given a grammatical category, like the other words in the level it appears in. I am only a beginner, but it appears to have multiple meanings (like so many common words in any language), so it would be helpful to know that the translation of ā€œtoā€ is only applicable when the word naar is a preposition.

https://en.bab.la/dictionary/dutch-english/naar

Also om, dan, nog donā€™t have any categories attached.

Are you one of the course contributors, V75?

I would be willing to add the grammatical categories where they are missing. I think it would be helpful to add this information.

Would you be able to let me be a course contributor? As I donā€™t know Dutch very well yet, I would only add these things and promise not to mess about with the course!

My ā€œqualificationsā€: I have been curating sehiraltiā€™s four-part course, ā€œ8,000+ Most Common Swedish Wordsā€ for the last three years, so I know my way around these databases. I speak fluent German, too, and have a university degree and a translatorā€™s diploma for German-English translations. I work part-time as an English teacher in adult education (and used to be full-time).

2 Likes

Level 4

echt - can the audio be changed? Itā€™s very loud and buzzy.

weg - can the English be changed to ā€œthe roadā€ to make it consistent with the other entries for nouns?

Yes, indeed.

I think I am the only active course contributor left. It used to be easy to make the changes but itā€™s no longer so. Iā€™ll sort it out this week.

1 Like