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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5781 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 1 of 6 11 February 2010 at 1:56pm | IP Logged |
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One way in which foreigners typically learn English is with basic English. This gives them a fully functionable but basic vocabulary of under 1000 words pretty quickly, once they know this they can communicate then learning various redundant words and the like becomes a easy thing.
Following through with Basic English a way in which I'm trying to learn Swedish (vocab) is with a basic English word list and finding the Swedish equivalents of the words. There aren't too many which don't translate so I hope this works out. I wonder though- why isn't this standard practice? Not literaly translation of basic English but rather the 1000 or so most common French or German or whatever words. Surely there isn't something special in a language as rich as English that it is only possible here? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5781 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 2 of 6 11 February 2010 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
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Darn, Iäve done it again, this should be in general.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 6 11 February 2010 at 2:13pm | IP Logged |
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Isn't this exactly the standard practice? Isn't this what just about every language teaching program does, from Pimsleur to Teach Yourself? The only difference seems to be that there's a standardized list in English, while most programs just make their own.
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| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5446 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 4 of 6 12 February 2010 at 12:12am | IP Logged |
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Basic English can provide a nice model for trying to think about what you need to know to have a "basic" command of another language. However, the idea that Basic English makes do with less than 1000 words is a little misleading, and relies upon a trait of English that does make it a special case:
In English, we use a lot of verbal phrases and circumlocutions as a matter of course. We can look up a word, look around a building, look at a new car, look over a document, look out for a friend, look down our nose, look through the newspaper... Likewise, we can go up the hill, go around the corner, go to work, go over a document, go out with our friends, go down the mountain, go through the field... Also, we can get up in the morning, get around difficult regulations, get to work on time, get over our old girlfriends/boyfriends, get out of the house, get down on the dance floor, get through a spot of difficulty... If you look at the paragraph above, what you'll find is that with three verbs and eight or nine prepositions, we have twenty-one phrasal verbs. In some cases (go out, go around) knowing the individual words may of course be enough to get what's going on, at least if they're used literally. But in others (get over, look out for), there may be a metaphorical sense whose link to the physical sense isn't immediately obvious. So, do my example sentences have three verbs? Twenty-one verbs? Likely, it's somewhere in the middle, but just how many verbs there are depends on a subjective sense of when a metaphor is obvious and when it is not, and whether you're counting for when the metaphor can be understood in context versus spontaneously generated without having expressly learned it before. Lots of languages use phrasal verbs, of course. But English seems to be just full of them and, what's more, eschewing them in favor of the alternatives is often seen as stuffy, highfalutin or pedantic. No one ascends a mountain, descends a staircase or mounts a bicycle without those around them rolling their eyes. So if you speak only Basic English (in America, at least) you can probably go for days without uttering a sentence that feels overly simplified or paraphrased to the average native speaker. Not so in languages like French, in my experience. Now, while mastering a translation of the Basic English wordlist in another language may only take you so far, that's not to say that it's not of use. To the contrary. If you take the verb list from Basic English and look up those verbs in a bigger Harraps, Collins or Langenscheidt dictionary (the ones that will tell you that in French "go up" is "monter," "go down" is "descendre"...) then you can broaden your vocabulary in the target language immeasurably for the price of looking up a dozen words a day for a week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| zooplah Diglot Senior Member United States zooplah.farvista.net Joined 6367 days ago 100 posts - 116 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: German | Message 5 of 6 12 February 2010 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, I've read that Basic English isn't that much easier than the queen's English.
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| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6271 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 6 15 February 2010 at 3:20pm | IP Logged |
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When I hear L2 speakers of English, it often seems to me that their active vocabulary in English is in the Basic English range, that is, about 500-1,000 words. But for most purposes, that seems to be enough, and in any L2 you can get quite far with a basic vocabulary of that scope.
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