Instead of arranging words by topic, the lesson vocabulary of Learn These Words First was carefully selected to maximize the explanatory power of your first 360 words:
- The lessons teach most of the highest-frequency words in English. After learning these 360 words, you will know more than half of the words you see on any typical page of English text.
- These 360 words are powerful for explaining things: They can explain all the other words in the dictionary. (They are used to define all 2000 words in the Longman Defining Vocabulary, which is used to define every word in the Longman Dictionary.)
- By learning these words first, you can use an English-English dictionary, so you can be immersed in English instead of relying on a bilingual dictionary.
4 comments:
Hello David,
- just to touch base again - to let you know what I am doing - as a very interested amateur linguist.
As you may recall from other brief correspondence between us, I continue to learn Vietnamese (still in very stop~start fashion). Clearly your non-circular dictionary (as well as the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory behind it) is a strong inspiration for me in my pursuit of my target language. [I do not have a formal teacher.] So my intention now is to check bilingual dictionaries (paper and on-line) to get the materials that will allow me to arrange a Vietnamese vocabulary in approximately the same order as in your on-line non-circular English dictionary.
In my brief and thus far infrequent exchanges with Vietnamese friends (both looking to improve their English and glad to help me with my Vietnamese pronunciation) I am striving to be able to discuss how Vietnamese is put together. In other words I guess this means "meta-language".
Regards,
John McKeon
"I am striving to be able to discuss how Vietnamese is put together."
I meant to clarify that I want to discuss Vietnamese words in Vietnamese! (as a way of climbing into the language by pulling myself up by the bootstraps!! Perhaps I am being completely naive, but I want to see how far I get ...)
Hi, John.
I think the non-circular dictionary could be a good guide for which words to learn first in another language. A few of the lesson words are there just to make English sound more fluent, but most of the words in the lessons are for concepts with near equivalents in many (if not most) languages.
In addition to translating words with a bilingual dictionary, you might consider using machine translation (https://www.bing.com/translator or https://translate.google.com) to translate whole sentences from the Learn These Words First lessons. This could give you a better sense of word order and words in context. Which you can then discuss with your Vietnamese friends.
I like the idea of learning a small core vocabulary that lets you discuss new Vietnamese words in Vietnamese. Please let me know how it works for you.
Best regards, David
Thank you for the tip about https://www.bing.com/translator. I shall compare it with google's.
"I like the idea of learning a small core vocabulary that lets you discuss new Vietnamese words in Vietnamese. Please let me know how it works for you."
This bootstrapping idea flows directly from your non-circular dictionary and the NSM theory. For starters I have always found it very motivational. Will be glad to keep in touch about this.
[I was originally hoping to give you more feedback from my TAFE students, but I have retired now and no longer have the sort of scope for experimenting that that provided.]
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