Hi shoeresearchalex-ga,
Here's a list of a thousand short sentences. It will be available for
download for thirty days. Visit this web page:
answers eSnips Folder
http://esnips.com/web/answers
The download the file sentences.txt
I assembled this list of sentences from a variety of public domain
material downloaded from Project Gutenberg:
Free eBooks - Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/
I trust it meets your requirements.
Regards,
eiffel-ga
Google Search Strategy:
"list of sentences"
://www.google.com/search?q=%22list+of+sentences%22 |
Request for Answer Clarification by
shoeresearchalex-ga
on
11 Jul 2006 08:51 PDT
Dear Eiffel,
Thank you very much for your answer. First of all I wanted to tell you
that I know you have put a lot of work in it as you copied and pasted
it before you made the text file out of it hence you'll obviously be
getting the fee.
I don't think I have explained the purpose well enough. It is
basically a translation game whereby I throw the sentences at him in
English and he has to give me the correct Spanish version. Being only
7, many of the sentences are not as simple as I wanted them to be.
Perhaps as the site deals with translations of authors who are going
back a few generations. However I don't mind continuing the research
myself and finding simpler sentences but to be honest, after playing
with the site, I have no idea how you actually got the sentences. Can
you give me an example ? And any idea how we can get more recent
authors for simpler sentence constructions ?
Best regards,
Alex
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Clarification of Answer by
eiffel-ga
on
11 Jul 2006 10:23 PDT
Hi shoeresearchalex-ga,
Oh dear, I wish I had known these sentences were for a 7-year-old.
I produced the list by downloading some eBooks in text-only format
from the Project Gutenberg website. Then I used various command-line
utilities that come with the Linux Operating System to manipulate the
text. For example, the dot at the end of the sentence can be replaced
with a line break to put every sentence on its own line. The "tr"
command ("transliterate") does this nicely.
I also used utilities to delete lines that contained abbreviations and
proper names, contained commas and other punctuation, or were too long
or too short. The "grep" command does this nicely.
After I while I stumbled across an eBook called "Fifteen Thousand
Useful Phrases" which also included a few sections containing
sentences or near-sentences:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18362/18362.txt
I made heavy use of that document, but I found that I needed to go
through each entry manually to delete the ones that were really
archaic. Even so, a lot of the language sounds a bit "old-fashioned".
In the end, it took much longer than I anticipated to assemble the
list of sentences.
Because Project Gutenberg only archives public-domain works, there's
not a lot of recent material there. I can find plenty of newer
literature on the web, but it's not in the form of sentence lists.
Stories tend to use the same words over and over again (which is why I
ended up at the "Fifteen Thousand" website whilst assembling the
original answer).
I found a lot of Spanish resources for children here:
Spanish just for Children
http://www.uni.edu/becker/children.html
Lots of the sites linked from that page have flash-cards, but the ones
I found were of individual words or phrases, not whole sentences.
There's a nice site here which reads out Children's stories in Spanish:
Cuentos Contados
http://pacomova.eresmas.net/paginas/cuentos%20contados.html
Back to the immediate question: how to get suitable sentences for a
7-year old child. Why not borrow from your local library some books
for young children then read them one sentence at a time? That should
keep the boy's interest more than a list of unrelated sentences.
If you wish, I would be happy to prepare "by hand" a list of fifty
sentences suitable for a 7 year old, to get you started. It would be
impractical to do this for a thousand sentences however. Would that be
a suitable way to resolve this problem?
Regards,
eiffel-ga
|
Request for Answer Clarification by
shoeresearchalex-ga
on
12 Jul 2006 11:15 PDT
Dear Eiffel,
Thank you very much for your email, advice, strategies, additional
website links and your suggestion of making 50 sentences. Don't worry
about the latter as obviously it was partly my fault as well. I really
appreciate what you have done and we can herewith close this peculiar
question.
Best wishes,
Alex
|
Request for Answer Clarification by
shoeresearchalex-ga
on
12 Jul 2006 11:17 PDT
Eiffel, I don't know what to do to rate your answer but I would give
it all of the stars possible of course.
Un saludo cordial,
Alex
|
Clarification of Answer by
eiffel-ga
on
12 Jul 2006 13:42 PDT
Thanks Alex for your kind comments. If you wish to rate this question,
you can follow the procedure described in the Google Answers FAQ:
"How do I rate an answer?"
First, log in to your Google Answers account. On the "My
Questions" page, you'll see a list of all the questions
you've asked so far. Click on the question whose answer
you want to rate. Rate the answer and add a comment in the
dialog box to explain your rating. Then click the "Submit
Rating" button to post your rating to the site...
Google Answers: Frequently Asked Questions
http://answers.google.com/answers/faq.html#ratequestion
Best regards,
eiffel-ga
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