The goal of "vortlisto" ("word list") is to produce a machine-readable vocabulary of words for an (English-speaking) Esperanto learner.
The source is based on a curated word list produced as part of a UK high school (GCSE) Esperanto syllabus that ran until 1996. The advantages of this source are that there's some academic consensus around the selection; the words are grouped by linguistic categories; "basic" words are tagged; and perhaps most importantly this list exists in a somewhat machine-readable state online already, thanks to Bill Walker who created a giant HTML page of it all with translations.
gcselist.htm- this is the original HTML documentvortlisto.htm- the original with some additional sub-categories and additional wordscsv/*.csv- a series of CSV files containing Esperanto and English words whose names reflect the category and levelvortlisto.rb- a Ruby program to convert the fixed HTML doc into the CSV files
If you wish to use vortlisto.rb's download capability gem install httparty.
Run with ./vortlisto.rb; run time is about a half second.
So far, I've successfully uploaded a CSV file directly to Cerego a spaced repetition learning site and app. I'm a fan of Cerego since it really seems to work, the UI & UX are pretty good, and they publish an API.
The first word list I uploaded was the "General Basic" list that contains 396 words. It turns out Cerego struggles with a word list this big; the app spins processing all the data (there's a lot of work per-word for its learning algorithm). Cerego recommend lists less than 100 associations. The other issue is that Cerego will present the words in the order they're uploaded which currently means grinding through a giant alphabetized list. Cerego is already full of progress markers so alphabetizing only seems to be a disadvantage.
The "General Basic" and some other lists need to be made much smaller; less than 100 items each. Two options are arranging into chunks of say 40 words by observed frequency (so learn most common words first) and by additional category like "color", "prepositions", etc. Those subcategories could also be arranged by frequency if only to break up the alphabetizing.
So far I have created some additional sub-categories in "General Basic" which has reduced "General Basic" to about half.
Here is a list of word counts in each section and level,
$ wc -l *-basic.csv | sort -n
12 general_color-basic.csv
15 house_and_home-basic.csv
19 general_pronouns-basic.csv
21 general_position-basic.csv
23 money-basic.csv
32 weather-basic.csv
39 places-basic.csv
41 general_numbers_and_measurements-basic.csv
42 affixes-basic.csv
46 services-basic.csv
50 health_and_welfare-basic.csv
51 language-basic.csv
53 general_correlatives-basic.csv
58 general_time-basic.csv
73 travel-basic.csv
92 life_at_home-basic.csv
95 shopping-basic.csv
106 free_time_entertainment-basic.csv
107 holidays-basic.csv
119 education_and_career-basic.csv
142 relations_with_others-basic.csv
158 food_and_drink-basic.csv
185 general-basic.csv
266 personal_identification-basic.csv
1845 total
$ wc -l *-advanced.csv | sort -n
9 house_and_home-advanced.csv
27 places-advanced.csv
30 money-advanced.csv
30 services-advanced.csv
30 weather-advanced.csv
31 life_at_home-advanced.csv
57 language-advanced.csv
57 shopping-advanced.csv
65 health_and_welfare-advanced.csv
65 travel-advanced.csv
71 education_and_career-advanced.csv
71 holidays-advanced.csv
91 food_and_drink-advanced.csv
93 free_time_entertainment-advanced.csv
107 personal_identification-advanced.csv
152 relations_with_others-advanced.csv
986 total
- Northern Examinations and Assessment Board (now part of AQA) for providing a nationally accredited Esperanto exam and the basis of this word list
- Bill Walker for converting that word list to HTML and translations
- Paul Makepeace for this package