Imitate, repeat, apply! English grammar at the count of three

It seems that we have not been here for a long time, and we do not return and return empty-handed: ta-dam! Until a certain point, Lingualeo was a great way to replenish vocabulary with fresh idioms and the lively vocabulary of TED speakers. You could develop skills by learning interesting content. But today everything has changed.

Over the next 7 minutes, you will learn what we learned from ourselves in childhood, about NLP parsing of sentences, modern front-end development features, and about a new way to learn grammar online.

Active users of Lingualeo have already been tested, have begun to pump their skills and monitor the progress in real time. We looked at the results of the grammar test, and saw where mistakes are made more often. And here we have two news. Both so-so.
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• First: on average, for every third question, students give the wrong answer.
• Second: 33% of newly registered users (and this, for a moment, about 4 million people) do not know the grammar of English.

It was necessary to do something. The understanding has come: the simplest mechanism of memorizing grammatical structures on the subconscious is necessary! Straight to the brain. So, ambitious.

Lingualeo already has grammar courses, you can study theory with them, which is what hundreds of thousands of people are doing at the moment. But the theory is better remembered with practice. Sometimes, to say something, you don't even need to know the rule. The main thing is to be sure: what you say is correct. Is it possible?

Dream English properly

We didn’t sleep at night, we thought about those unfortunate people, who are well off the heart of learning the formal rules, but really want to speak, write and dream in English correctly. About diligent students who are not at all guilty of the fact that the human brain itself decides what to remember and what to forget, we also experienced.

Most learned to distinguish between times, beginning to speak their native language in early childhood. We just repeated for adults! Sometimes we were corrected, and we remembered where the error was. The basic principle was the imitation and reproduction of the correct patterns. Here it is - a good way to pump grammar, we are suitable.

So, meet the new section of Lingualeo for the practice of English - Grammar .



Inside the section - simulator grammatical structures. The user will have to collect phrases from the proposed words in a strict order. In each case, practicing the use of a particular formula. Thousands of examples for each rule never repeat, so that the student remembers not the specific examples, but the principle itself.



Each case of the use of a particular time or grammatical formula has an indicator of knowledge and "strength" of knowledge. It turns green as it is generally studied. Over time, something will be forgotten - during this period the indicator will change color, and Leo will strongly recommend repeating the material.

By the way, training is integrated into the system of tasks, with all the benefits of interval repetition. Training vocabulary and the development of entertainment and educational materials are interspersed, now with a grammar simulator. This is the same "interleaving", which we took a course at the end of last year.

The following few paragraphs are recommended for those who like to go into details.

Understand how it works

Right now, while the section is working in beta mode, the simulator is free. It has 10 rules, from very simple to very complex (modal verbs, participles and passive voice). The section will evolve, and over time we will cover all grammatical structures.



Clicking on the rule, we get to the workout. For one approach, you need to collect 10 sentences. If the student makes mistakes, they are highlighted, and a new chance is given - and so on until, finally, he does not add up the chain in the right order. Correctly composed proposal is automatically voiced. Do not forget to choose a pronunciation option - British or American.



If the construction of the construction and use cases are not yet familiar, then before you begin to collect the proposal, you can use the hint by clicking the "Show rule" button. What is important - the rule is explained in the native language, with many examples.

Those who managed to familiarize themselves with the theory on grammar courses can immediately begin to assemble constructs. Our team tried so that the training did not lead to longing. There are thousands of examples in it, not invented by aunts and uncles-compilers of textbooks, but pulled out of your favorite books and the most interesting scientific articles in the Lungaleo Jungle. Yes, some people had to do the parsing of all these proposals in hundreds of thousands of materials - more on that later.

Go into details (no, seriously)

Parsing works like this: when publishing content in the Jungle, it is processed by our NLP service. The service parses the content into sentences and words, determines their various properties (both sentences and words). For sentences, this is a grammatical model; for words, frequency. After such processing, the texts fall into moderation. UGC-content involves a large number of errors in the sentences, so we select only qualitative and interesting from the total number of examples. The operator assigns a rule or several rules to the model, after which all the proposals of this model can be sent to training. Ta-dam!

And now, how we present all this beauty to users. In web development, trends can change every week, and the latest code may become outdated in a year. The history of our product has 5 years. During this period, a lot of architectural corrections and improvements were made. At some point, it became clear that a transition to something conceptually different was needed, which would help simplify the new code and reduce the cost of supporting it. After much discussion and controversy, we chose the next stack of JS technologies:

• React - the basis of the API for its own implementation;
• Virtual DOM - work with Virtual DOM;
• BEM - styles, resources;
• Redux - data stream;
• webpack - stash: in the near future we plan to make the basis of the entire assembly.

An exceptionally comfortable environment has emerged that is suitable for working on our product. The results of the first experiments - in the " Grammar " section and in the journal of progress .

Become the first tester

See for yourself what we have done! The grammar is already waiting for the first testers. And write, please, if you find mistakes - we need your help!

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