Drill Vocab's Blog

DrillVocab is Online (Again)

Date: September 2, 2011
By: Nicolas

Wow! Sorry about that... I was out of the state and country off and on for the past two months. It seems that a thunderstorm kicked the power and killed the server. The server has been rebuilt and is running again. The language map feature should be operational again as well.

Extended Russian Vocab

Date: December 22, 2010
By: Nicolas

Added an additional 20 Russian vocabulary words to the server. We now have 1060 words, comprising 64.5% of Russian words you are likely to encounter. Let me explain, since I often have questions regarding this percentage.

To find out which words are which percent of a language, perform the following task. Find a book, speech, newspaper, dialog, or just about anything else with words in it. Next, count how many times each word appears. In English, we can expect words like "a/an", "the", etc. to appear many times. Thus, the 100 most common words are likely to form a large percent of the language (e.g. 20-30%). So not all words are equal! In English, we can expect to encounter words like "the" far more often than, say, "dictionary". Thus we can learn the bulk of a language with only 1000-5000 words.

Hardware Upgrade

Date: December 6, 2010
By: Nicolas

I recently purchased a new external hard drive to back the server up on before I go ahead and upgrade it. This should fix the problem with the language maps not showing up and otherwise improve the website.

Blog Created

Date: November 4, 2010
By: Nicolas

Today marks the creation of the Drill Vocab Blog! The intended purpose of this blog is to communicate website changes, developments, and related thoughts to you, the user.

Recently, I really screwed over the server's X-server, which is used to create the language maps. You'll note that the language map feature isn't working at the moment. This is something I hope to get fixed in the next few weeks, so hang in there!