Vocabulary, Vocabulary, Vocabulary - a thought and a tool

When you're starting to learn a language, one of the trickiest things is building a core vocabulary. For one thing, while you can find word frequency lists, these tell you what to recognize for reading, but not what you actually need to know for basic communication. Speaking of basic communication, a long time ago, CK Ogden proposed Basic English, a subset of English with 850 words that should be sufficient for everyday communication, with the suggestion that for any particular specialty another 100 words of so should be sufficient for specialized communication. This has led to standards for, eg, aircraft manuals, since there needs to be a way to be sure - very sure! - that a non-native has a better than average chance of understanding perfectly for certain technical subjects.

If you're learning English, the Basic English vocabulary makes a darn good core to start with. But it's particular to English (and to a lesser extent to Germanic languages) in its assumptions about how ideas can be combined to form new meanings without an overly burdensome vocabulary. So if you're building a core vocabulary for a new language, the list can give you inspiration for figuring out the sorts of things you'd like to be able to say but haven't thought of looking up yet, but a one-to-one translation into a different language may prove more interesting than useful. Still, the ideas behind Basic English may, as I said, give some sense of how you want to put together your own studies to build a core vocabulary for the language you're learning.

The 850 items in Basic English are here. The Wikipedia article on Basic English and with lots of links to other efforts to simplify English is here.

* * *

I stumbled across a great website the other day - and how could I not, it's at the top of the Google listings for online dictionaries - but I hadn't used it before and have been greatly impressed since I started: WordReference.com. It has the Oxford dictionaries for Spanish, French, Italian, German and Russian, but since you're searching online, not flipping through paper pages, you can get a ton of words, phrases and other entries to look up with a minimum of effort. What I like best of all is it's ability to make recommendations when you give it two or three word phrases for translation. If you're trying to translate idiomatic English and just can't remember which specialized verb+preposition combination does what in the Romance language you're working in, it's great (at least that's been my experience with French and Spanish so far).

Freedom of Speech, Critical Thinking and the Best Way to Learn a Language

Over at The Linguist, Steve's been looking at critical thinking and freedom of speech. Notes Steve, those who mean well are often the quickest to want both to teach critical thinking and to limit the freedom of speech. This, to me, is like teaching someone to make cookies but forbidding them from acquiring flour and chocolate chips: free speech is the raw material on which one exercises one's critical faculties in a free society.

On the question of critical thinking, I think there's a very basic misconception which leads all sorts of well-meaning people astray: critical thinking is not always a tool for arriving at the right answer so much as a means of finding the right answer for you. If I love to work with my hands and am therefore contemplating becoming an accountant - I'll get to push pencils all day! - critical thinking may cause me to reexamine my premises and become a mechanic or a sculptor instead. In the larger scheme of things, likewise, critical thinking will not tell us whether we should invade Iraq, have national health care or criminalize duck hunting. Absolute answers to these questions don't exist. Critical thinking may, however, help a nation decide whether the decision it makes is congruent with the kind of nation its people want it to be.

Robert Heinlein noted that if it can't be expressed in figures, it's opinion, not fact. But that's countered by the old quip that figures don't lie but liars figure. Most often, the liars who are figuring start by lying to themselves. The other day, a colleague remarked that another person in the company had gone about things the wrong way, perhaps, but that he meant well. I breezily chirped in that Hitler had meant well too, but things could have turned out better where he was involved. I was surprised by the vociferousness with which the response came: "He did not!" To this person, it was inconceivable that a person she conceived of as being evil could have had any intention other than to go down in history as synonymous with cruelty, barbarism and megalomania. This is usually the response I get because if even Hitler meant well, people sense, that means that it's not good enough that their own intentions are good. They also have to make sure that the things they do have a positive outcome and this requires thinking before acting and acting according to a mixture of reason and feeling, not feeling alone.

Critical thinking, per se, probably cannot be taught. It can be modeled, to a degree of course. But when it comes to procedures and processes, critical thinking is better for telling us what not to do than what we should do. An acquaintance with the more common logical fallacies won't lead to you acting according to unerring good sense, but it will keep you from repeating the most common mistakes over and over again: at least if you make a mistake, it will be a new one! But in the end, critical thinking tells us more about whether our conclusions emerge logically from our premises or whether we're using the kind of wishful thinking that says, "I'm very pragmatic: since I couldn't afford a Rolls-Royce on my minimum wage income, I settled for a Porsche and saved $200,000. Now I've got enough to make a down payment on a house!"

The reason freedom of speech is so important is that in a world where absolute right answers are relatively scarce, a people has to work to find the right answers for having the kind of country they want to have and living the kinds of lives they want to lead. You can't have perfect order and absolute freedom - the crazies will use their freedom to disrupt order. But you can't have perfect order with no freedom either - the crazies will step outside of the order and lots of people will follow them. So society has to strike a balance, figuring out what it will put up with and in what measure in return for the freedoms and opportunities for growth that are associated versus the restrictions it will put up with in order to maintain order and security. Societies that decide wrongly - Zimbabwe is a strikingly horrifying example these days - pay the price for not finding that balance. Societies that do better - much of Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia come to mind - tend to make the money and live the good life. These are, incidentally, the places where open discussion and even downright nasty discussion can take place in the open and where political and financial marketplaces can quickly determine what citizens and consumers will accept as right for them in the aggregate, if not locating the Platonic essence of correctness.

Aristotle said that the good is that at which all things aim. He meant to say that we all mean to do well, unless we are mad, and that in the long run we'll find our way to virtue and intelligent action by the observation of what reasonable and reasonably well off people tend towards. It's sort of circular - something is good because it's aimed at, and it's aimed at because it's good. But this hit or miss notion does well at explaining how self-causing moralities and notions of justice wind up creating stable and profitable societies that march along across the centuries, adjusting here and there but evolving more than changing outright. Freedom of speech and the exercise of critical faculties in deciding what to do with the content of that free speech have tended to create societies that may not be the best by some objective criteria, but that are the ones that everyone seems to want to emigrate to, and so we're back to the good as that at which all things aim.

The above may seem like an idle meditation. In fact, it is but prelude.

The good news is that what follows is much shorter!

What Steve has to say about critical thinking and freedom of speech dovetails nicely with something closer to our focus here: The Best Way to Learn a Foreign Language. To put it simply, there is none. While we tend all of us to grow up in societies and learn languages according to a combination of assimilation and instruction, we are all different. Our backgrounds are different, our experiences in the world are different, the wiring of our brains varies.

It is safe to say that if someone came up with "the food method" - you eat tuna fish to learn German, roast beef to learn French and rice to learn Russian, and that's all you need to do - you could call that person crazy and say that he had no business being a language teacher. Our critical faculties will tell us that we're unlikely to find a mechanism whereby the consumption of certain foods would alter our environment or perception of it sufficiently to cause a new language to come into our brains. But when it comes to Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, The Linguist and those old Dover Essential Grammar of... books, it's plausible to see them as language learning tools. That given, some will want to say, "Yeah, but which one's the best?" That depends on who you are and how you learn.

A certain company whose name escapes me boasts that more people have learned with that company's products than any other. Given the number of monolinguals in the United States, I'd be keeping my mouth shut or somebody's going to notice that twice as many people bought the CDs as speak Spanish and wonder what happened! At any rate, it's great that we haven't found the best way of learning languages, because if we had, all the people it didn't work for would be in trouble. Instead, there's a marketplace of ideas about learning and marketplaces to purchase implementations of those ideas. So have a look around, see what feels right for you and move on if something isn't working for you. If nothing works for you, you will need to examine your commitment to learning and the dedication with which you study. But the odds are that if you're learning one of the more common languages, the right book or CD set to get you started is sitting in a bookstore or online retailer just waiting for you to discover it. Happy searching. And remember, even if it says you'll learn everything you need to know in ten days, it still might have some good stuff and be worth looking at, even if the publisher's marketing department needs a good scolding.

Personal Update Tired of shirking my Breton studies with Assimil, I've deliberately put them on the back burner for the moment. I'm rereading a lesson every two or three days or doing the scriptorium variation I mentioned the other day. In the meantime, I've gotten a hold of a good Breton dictionary and Turn of the Ermine - an anthology of Breton literature - and have been reading, translating and listening to music. I'll come back to the Assimil in a week or two when I get tired of looking things up and decide it's time to expand my knowledge a little more systematically again.

Notes on Language Learning and Breton

Language Learning

1. Acting as if... and believing it!
Every now and again, there's some chatter about polyglots past and present. And as soon as the polyglots show up, there are others who will notice the polyglot doesn't speak their language that well. But if you know a language perfectly and never open your mouth, then the person who knows four words poorly and deploys them wherever possible is ahead of you. Likewise, the polyglots who aren't really fluent in twenty languages but can make a reasonable effort at communicating ought be given their due. And we can learn from them: Thinking you're a polyglot won't make you a polyglot, of course. But thinking you're not a polyglot will assure you don't become one.

One of the contradictions of language learning is that you have to have the humility to demure about your abilities yet be willing to put them on display. Je parle français... un peu. Hablo español... un poquito... This requires maintaining a different internal conversation from what you project to the outside world. You need to tell yourself Je parle français très bien so that you'll feel comfortable speaking up even as the words coming out of your mouth tell your interlocutor the absurd Je ne parle pas français, pas vraiment - which is an obvious contradiction.

The point here is to watch your internal conversations closely. Because while you don't want to be one of those polyglots about whom native speakers say "He doesn't really speak my language," you do want to have that confidence that allows you to believe in yourself, believe in your skills and believe in the work you've put in.

Do you find yourself saying I'll never speak... or I just can't find the time to study or This is too hard for me... Or any of the other excuses we make to ourselves for not doing our best? Once you decide to learn a language, you should commit yourself to being an improving speaker of the language - humble about your talents, but not utterly dismissive of them. Keep a healthy internal dialog and things will come more naturally since your feelings about the challenges of learning won't be getting in the way of the actual learning.

Speaking of which...

2. Getting back into learning
Over at the Cunning Linguist, there's a short note on the pain of getting back into language learning when you've been away for a while. If there's one thing harder than sticking to your routine when life gets busy, it's getting back in the groove when things settle down. But the right attitude can help.

Breton
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but if not, it's worth checking out the courses at Wikiversity. Here's the Language School. And here's the Breton page. Note that for some reason, the Breton lessons are much more developed than for some other languages. Depending on your language, this may be a pleasant surprise or something rather less.

Getting Back to Work

The other day, I mentioned that I'd sort of stalled on my Breton sans peine and needed to get back to it. The challenge is that I'd been hitting some passages where Breton really thinks things through differently from English - sentences like this:

Hag ur wech erruet en e gampr,
And one time arrived in his room,
e salaou gant dudi
listens (to) with pleasure
ar pennadoù bet enrollet gantañ
the conversations been recorded with him
war seizenn e vagnetofon.
on tape (of) his recorder.

Once he's back in his room, he listens with pleasure to the conversations he's recorded on the tape in his recorder.

Of course we string together long sentences in English too, but we have a different notion of how the pieces fit together. Breton loves to use "conjugated prepositions" - prepositions marked for person, number and (for 3rd person singular) gender - to link up bit of sentences, for example.

Given time, of course, one can not only break down individual sentences but also develop an eye (and maybe one day an ear!) for relating the elements more automatically. The hard part is getting through to that stage. Looking for some way to keep myself moving through the readings while getting something from it, I started thinking about Professor Arguelles' Scriptorium. Says the good professor:

The whole purpose of this exercise is to force yourself to slow down and pay attention to detail. This is the stage at which you should check all unknowns in grammars or dictionaries...

This is exactly what I needed - to slow myself down and think through what I was reading without descending into grammar-translation.

Professor Arguelles' exercise, of course, is for regular use in language learning, and if you've the time and patience I commend his advice to you for broader application. That said, I think this works even for specific passages because it gets you more wholly involved in working with the language - physically manifesting it almost - so that you don't just keep skimming over bits you don't quite get until you suddenly realize you're not quite getting any of it.

One other thing: This exercise, and indeed numerous other exercises, may not be for you when you're stalled. What's important is that somewhere out there, there probably is something that will work for you, or at least that can be modified for you. So check out the links on this site, and on all the other sites, and keep in mind what you're reading. As long as you keep working with the language and keep building on what you're learning you will progress, whatever the tools you use.

So if you're here to kill some time after doing your lessons, take a little time to visit Professor Arguelles's site and see if there's something else you might want to make use of in your learning. But if you're here because you wanted to do something language related but just don't have the heart to crack open your book or listen to your CDs right now, make an extra special point of looking at the Scriptorium and Shadowing technique and maybe at a few other sites till you find something you haven't tried before, or haven't tried in a while. And then, get back to work.