1. Fluent Forever
  2. Community
  3. General Discussion

Word List

Avatar
Fluent Forever
Hi Gabriel, great website and resources. I really like what you have written about vocab memorisation and not learning clusters of similar words. I experienced this myself recently, when I was taught the words 'bring' and 'give' in Dari. These are 'biar' and 'bete' (I have not yet begun learning Dari script.) Two similar words - both short and beginning with 'b' sound and with very similar meanings. Because I learnt them together, I constantly confuse them! I have now made the macabre mental assocation of biar (bring) with 'bier', the English word meaning 'a movable frame on which a coffin is placed on' as it is associated with 'bring', and stops me getting confused... I have got the 625 word list - but I am curious. I could not find the verb 'to have' on this list, or the verb 'to like'. In my own language learning, these are probably the most frequent verbs I use in the early stages, and in many languages are also useful for past tense forming. Why don't they appear on the list?

* Originally posted by mwid1974.

Didn't find what you were looking for?

New post
Was this post helpful?
0 out of 0 found this helpful

Comments

1 comment

Sort by Date Votes
  • Avatar
    Fluent Forever
    So the word list is a cross between a frequency list and a visual list. Meaning I've skipped out on any words I've found that are likely to be a challenge to visualize.

    "to have" and "to like" COULD make it onto that list, but I think I dropped them due to challenges I foresaw in terms of easily learning them via pictures in some languages. Specifically, there's some ambiguity between like/love that's going to be different from language to language, and the sense of ownership also can fall apart from language to language (Russian, for instance, doesn't really use a verb to indicate ownership..they just say "To me [there is a] hat")

    The overall goal here is not to get a comprehensive vocabulary at the start, but rather to have a bunch of good building blocks that you can use to build onto. Inevitably, a student progressing past the 625 list is going to pick up 'to have' and 'to like' pretty soon thereafter.

    * Originally posted by Gabriel Wyner.
    0

Please sign in to leave a comment.