Words Known And Root Recognition
Learning a language can be much fun and it is very fulfilling when you can finally read a book or understand something that's spoken in a movie or news item. However, 95% procent of people trying to learn a language never reach that stage. Presumably this is because of the boring lessons and artificial texts that go with them, or with the lack of visible progress and even those that manage to finish a regular course will find out that they cannot read a book yet or understand what's been said in the movie. Getting to the level of word comprehension that allows you to read or understand your foreign language of choice will take a lot of blood, sweat and tears even after you managed to finish that regular course.
All this we try to make fun and easy, by providing pre-translated e-books with software that makes you remember all those new words which would otherwise take you months or years to remember. The circle graphs below show the progress in your vocabulary or rather the level of word comprehension when following the Bermuda Word program and reading our e-books. Here we have to explain the difference with words known and root recognition. Words you know you have learned literally, while words of which you recognize the root, and thus can translate, you have learned because you know other words with that same root, and by reading and encountering forms of that root word you learn how to recognize new words even if you didn't learn them literally. The numbers below indicate word comprehension for an average short story.
The Only Course With Visible Progress
Bermuda Word offers the only course with visible progress in language learning that is immediately translated into actual improved reading comprehension. The progress page shows the number of new words learned but also how this impacts your comprehension of the subsequent chapters. And if you finish a Bermuda Word e-book the next Bermuda Word e-book will show the impact of the words that you learned in the last book on your reading comprehension of chapters in the new book. Depending on the e-books that we have already published you can get to 90% of words known and 98% root recognition, that is, on top of the 90% that you directly recognize there's 8% for which you will recognize the roots and thus can translate as well. Starting from 95% word comprehension texts become independently readable, so this means that after following for example the Bermuda Word program for French you can take a French best seller and read it by yourself.
Here's some demystification about these numbers however. 98% comprehension of the text doesn't mean that you know 98% of the words of the language. The number of new words in a text and its percentage of the total number of words in a text depends on the size of the text. As you can see in our product picture examples of progress pages (don't say this while eating) the Title & Contents chapter has the highest percentage of unknown words. This is simply because in larger texts, words start to repeat. High frequency words like "the" and "it" occur more often than "gratification". That's also why some first chapters of Fairytales can have a higher number of unknown words than the first chapters of Short Stories, as is shown in below example of Dutch Folktales and Dutch Short Stories. The longer the text, the more words are going to repeat themselves, and the lower the percentage of new words. So although the percentage of words that you understand go up, part of this my be ascribed to larger chapters. This also means that you will progress fast to over 60% word comprehension. However, when looking at the totals the progress is obvious. Dutch Short Stories with on average more complex words than Dutch Folk Tales has only 16% unknown words (not even counting words for which you will recognize the root form). And that is the average, which means that when finishing the current e-books for the Bermuda Word Dutch program (and there will be more), you will be nearing 90% words known in an average text, apart from the words of which you recognize the root and thus can figure out by yourself.
Fun and Easy With Visible Results
The reason behind the progress that you have with Bermuda Word e-books is that you are combining extensive reading with spaced repetition. Extensive reading is the best way to organically form the structure of a language in your brain, because words are part of sentences which in turn are part of a story, and stories form a language. Normally extensive reading of large foreign language texts is a drag, but with immediate, correct and in correct conjugation pop-up translation it becomes easy. Furthermore, we all know that we memorize by repetition, and spaced repetition has been found to support word memorization best. When reading the stories in Bermuda Word e-books you repeat higher frequency words by yourself already, and low frequency words are reminded to you by the integrated spaced repetition software. Repeating with flash cards or cramming words can be boring, and ineffective in the long term, but the software in our e-books make sure you only repeat where necessary. This way you can reach up to 100% word memorization, which is easily checked by rereading a chapter and finding out that you can now read it fluently.
The best example is our French program where we currently have the most e-books. The Fairy Tales were designed (a 100 years ago) to teach French at a simple level and contain a lot of repeating words, hence the low average percentage of unknown words. The beginner texts have been set up for, yes, beginners as well, but because of the abc nature of its chapters, contain totally different subject in every chapter, and hence a lot of new words per chapter. The short stories are definitely not designed for beginners and classic stories by classic French authors, and thus have a high number of unknown words as well. But the Romantic Stories finally show the impact of the Bermuda Word e-book program. The average there is 14% unknown words if you finish them after the other e-books, whereas when you would start with Romantic Stories you would encounter almost 30% unknown words. And that is an average. Starting your first French story without following the Bermuda Word program would mean you have to look up every one out of two words. With our program your word comprehension goes to almost 90%, and since your root recognition capability will grow with all the reading you did you probably are at 98% word recognition after finishing reading and learning the Bermuda Word e-books with fun and ease.
