Resource: SMARTool for Learners of Russian

Announcing the SMARTool for learners of Russian (Strategic Mastery in Acquiring Rich morphology Tool), a free open-source resource you can find here: https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/.

SMARTools: Strategic Mastery in Acquiring Rich morphology: Tools for language learning

Many languages have “rich morphology”, meaning that words can have many different forms to signal grammatical categories such as case, number, tense, etc. Rich morphology presents a challenge for second language learners because even a basic vocabulary of a few thousand words can entail mastery of over a hundred thousand word forms. This is particularly the case with Slavic languages like Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Croatian, Baltic languages like Lithuanian and Latvian, and Uralic languages like Finnish and Estonian, but not irrelevant for a Romance language like Spanish with large paradigms for verbs. However, only a handful of the potential forms of any given word occur frequently, while the remainder are rare (some vanishingly so).

Now that linguists have digital collections of language samples known as “corpora” it is possible to scientifically determine which forms of any given word are of highest frequency, as well as what grammatical and collocational contexts motivate those few frequent forms. This makes it possible to strategically focus language learning in a new way and make new tools available to the public. This new approach has been realized for 3000 vocabulary items in the SMARTool for Russian for English-speaking learners: https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/. A computational learning experiment gives evidence that this approach is better than expecting learners to memorize entire paradigms of forms.

A proposal for a SMARTools COST Action (EU funding) is underway to coordinate implementation of SMARTools for languages of Europe and beyond with digital tools that are free and open-source.