As a non-native English speaker whose reading and listening comprehension are on an almost native-like level, I’m contemplating on whether or not to start logging books I’ve read, and movies and tv-series I’ve watched for the English side of Natively. I don’t have to think about the levels since I can just comfortably watch and read anything, and the only time I’m having any trouble at all is if a character speaks in a really hard to understand accent or there are a lot of dialectal words. I’m sure all of this applies to a lot of users here.
Using the English Natively wouldn’t benefit me in any way, but being able to help others the way Japanese side of Natively has helped me is already a good enough reason. The site can only really work properly if there are users of all levels using it. We still need even the most advanced learners to grade the most difficult titles for them to have grades in the first place. But the problem is how can you expect to make fair difficulty comparisons with different titles, when even the most difficult ones are easy for you? Is there any point in grading titles then? I have recently noticed that I’m starting to have this problem with relatively easy Japanese movies and series as well. Pretty much everything below 28 or so starts to feel equally easy. Just as I was writing this, I noticed that you could mark yourself as being fluent in a language and choose whether to help with the difficulty gradings or not (I was going to suggest something similar). There was some conversation about this in a product request -page, but the conversation didn’t go too deep into what it means, if all fluent people stop grading the books. I don’t want to crowd that page with this conversation, since it’s supposed to be about the product request not some philosophical conversations, so I’m making a separate one.
I’m interested to hear other users’ thoughts about this. At what point does it stop making sense to grade titles? Who’s grading the most difficult books then? Should there be some level cap for fluent users? Once a title goes below, say Lvl 35 or something, fluent users couldn’t grade them anymore. Should this apply to all users? Once you are constantly grading titles with levels in their 30s, you wouldn’t be able to grade titles with their levels in lower 20s. Are there people here who have reached this level of fluency in a language they’ve used Natively for? Do you feel it still makes sense to keep grading? Does any of this even matter? Sorry for the rambling, but I hope you understood where I’m coming from here. I hope this can start a useful and necessary conversation about the matter.
I think it comes down to personal awareness of what you used to find hard and what other learners may find hard. Some books it’s easier to recognize those features than others as well.
I pay a lot of attention to grammar and notice when things are using a lot of flourish or uncommon structures. I assume for a lot of learners that will be harder, and take that into consideration.
I also pay attention to vocab spread. Is this a book about crime, that only uses basic crime words (arrest, murder, trial, etc), or does it go into specialized vocab in that field (manslaughter, no contest, 2nd degree, etc). Does it spread into lots of different fields of vocab like crime and physics and baseball?
Something harder for me to pick up that I know is difficult for many learners is the use of idioms and casual speech. Both are harder to look up, vary regionally, and are super easy to learn as a native but take a lot more effort to pick up as a learner. So I try, but realize it’s a potential blindspot.
All this to say - I think you can grade well enough to be helpful at fluent levels of a language, but it’s going to come down to the individual how comfortable they are doing things like the above. I can totally see some people just saying ‘nope, not for me’ and that’s fine.
I’ve been wondering about this too, as English is my first - and main - language, but there are still some things that are clear differences in difficulty, and I remember some of my reading progression as a kid as well
Like I couldn’t tell you if there’s a difference btwn Goosebumps and Animorphs, but there’s certainly a noteable difference in level between those & The Dark Elf Trilogy or Tolkien, etc.
Personally I think I’ll mark myself as Fluent and stay out of grading. One can always leave a review and mention relevant linguistic points
Wrt Japanese - where I am fluent, but not effortlessly so, and my reading still has where to go - basically what @cat said. I’ve mostly stopped grading things below L26, bc like you said, I can’t tell the difference anymore.
For what it’s worth - I think it’s ok to make liberal use of the ‘skip’ and ‘block’ functionalities. In beta languages you get a lot more big level gap comparisons like you’re describing @暁のルナ . You can skip the ones that are too close to call. And maybe after the language is out of beta, turn off your grading.
This is a very good issue to bring up and a complicated one. I’m just so happy at how conscientious everyone is - it’s the only way the site works
It seems like you are making the judgement on whether or not to grade something individually for each title, which makes sense. But I wonder if it would make sense to have an option to automatically skip all gradings below a certain level. Kinda like with the level cap I suggested, just that you would give it to yourself.
most of them (probably 80%) I read in the last century and for many books I don’t remember well their relative difficulty; for the same reason I rated only about half of them
it‘s way too much work anyway to bulk grade about 180 books
I‘ll probably grade newly read ones like „The amazing Maurice and his educated rodents“ sometime, when I am through skipping the rest.
I would say it really depends of how aware you are.
With Spanish for example, I do have some difficulty comparing books under L30, but otherwise I’m still able to tell, well, this mystery has crime/police and lots of unrelated medical vocab, that makes it a bit more difficult than your average mystery. And because I specifically studied grammar for a few years, I can tell if a lot of advanced grammar pops up in a book and grade it accordingly. I also take into account sentence length and how experimental the writing is, and I also consider the POVs, whether or not it’s made very clear who is talking.
For English though, I already understood some English before I started taking ESL classes (I’m like a heritage speaker minus the heritage bit, I just happen to be born in the US), and what I did in class was all basic stuff anyway, so I don’t actually know what’s advanced. It’s the same when it comes to vocab, and since my vocab knowledge is so broad nowadays I struggle to notice what your average learner wouldn’t necessarily know. I’m even worse at remembering that a novel having different dialects makes it more difficult, I notice the vocab when I read but I don’t necessarily think of that when trying to think of the difficulty level. I can still go by domains and focus on the writing, but I don’t feel comfortable grading anything with just that. It is something I can mention in the reviews however.
With Korean I don’t think I’ll ever have too many issues grading things, even a few years from now, because I spent a lot of time looking at grammar points so I know what’s advanced and what’s intermediate. And since I have the data for how many words I know vs the total amount of individual words in a novel, it’s easy to compare two novels when it comes to vocab.
The main issue is going to be with initial gradings. I guess for books that haven’t been graded yet each user would just have to make a judgement call?
I think with the initial gradings you would start to grade them normally as it’s usually still possible to tell its rough level (like if it’s more like Lvl 30 or Lvl 25), but once the temporary grade goes below your set value it would leave it at that. The initial grade is usually temporary Lvl 30 so as long as you don’t set the value below that it would work. (Edit. I kind of forgot manga starts with a lower Lvl 24, which is a bit low for this purpose.) Another possibility would be that the titles without gradings would not be treated as being any level, but you would start grading them regardless of your level cap, and once the system has established some rough level for it, it would again leave it at that.
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Sorry for the rambling, but I hope you understood where I’m coming from here. I hope this can start a useful and necessary conversation about the matter.
