How the words we teach English language learners changed

Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by jonahx on Sunday August 02, 2026 @03:21PM (#49147456)

> This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!

Depends what you mean by "proficient". I currently know ~6k Spanish words and would hesitate to self-apply that word. Others might, but damn languages are hard.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by WalterBright on Sunday August 02, 2026 @08:22PM (#49149793)

> Depends what you mean by "proficient".

I thought I was pretty clear - you could understand at the level of television. Television scripts are dumbed down.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by jonahx on Monday August 03, 2026 @01:55AM (#49151701)

Depends on a number of factors, but the majority of people with a 2k word vocabulary would not understand much of a Spanish television show or news cast at native speed. If you were reading the script, it might be different.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by theli0nheart on Sunday August 02, 2026 @02:33PM (#49147066)

Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by refactor_master on Sunday August 02, 2026 @04:43PM (#49148115)

No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by WalterBright on Sunday August 02, 2026 @05:39PM (#49148624)

Working with ESL people makes it clear that grammar isn't so important. One of my friends would say, instead of "go shopping", would say "make some shoppings". Instead of "it's time to go", he'd say "time for go". All words that started with 's' were pronounced 'ehs', as in "gas ehstation".

The other people at work soon picked those lines up, and we used them regularly amongst ourselves. I still use them decades later!

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by Thraway198 on Sunday August 02, 2026 @07:32PM (#49149472)

This is grammar from their native language. They dont know the English grammar, so they just assume it's the same as the one they understand. You just understand them via the context.

Older Europeans used to say 'AND NOW WE MAKE PARTY!"

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by kevin_thibedeau on Sunday August 02, 2026 @07:42PM (#49149534)

English is a fault tolerant language that is usually comprehensible with errors. That isn't generally applicable to all languages.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by WalterBright on Monday August 03, 2026 @02:55PM (#49159951)

> That isn't generally applicable to all languages.

I'm skeptical of that claim.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by ButlerianJihad on Sunday August 02, 2026 @07:00PM (#49149287)

But your friend was applying consistent rules of grammar from his mother tongue. Having learned some vocabulary, he would mentally form the phrases in his head, and then literally translate out the words and tenses.

Grammar was so important to him that he was adhering to the grammatical rules he knew. It would be interesting to know how he would perform with writing or typing instead of contemporaneous conversation.

"go" in particular is an irregular verb, and also one of the most versatile words in the English language. Having studied how to conjugate "go" in other languages, I do not envy anyone trying to conjugate or just use it in an English sentence!

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by WalterBright on Sunday August 02, 2026 @08:06PM (#49149705)

The point was I understood him perfectly despite the execrable grammar.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by Thraway198 on Monday August 03, 2026 @05:10PM (#49161475)

That's cause you knew what he wanted to do, and there was no other possible meaning from "make some shopping."

If he just said "make shopping some" it would have been less clear.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by teddyh on Monday August 03, 2026 @12:26AM (#49151211)

Put volume!

— Trevor Noah, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtz0WZSNcPA#t=43s>

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by yongjik on Sunday August 02, 2026 @06:45PM (#49149196)

Me go market, find juice, say sugar free

nice! sugar free!

me take juice, me take sugar, police take me, why? hell!

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by theli0nheart on Monday August 03, 2026 @12:52AM (#49151344)

I think we have different definitions of “proficient”. :)

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by lesostep on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @05:30AM (#49166204)

Tbh, that's how I learned English. Rudimentary grammar, knew a few words, and then just read with dictionary until I didn't need a dictionary. Also watched a lot of shows until I didn't need subtitles.

Languages are weird like that – if you use them enough, your brain just figures some things out. After all, natural languages are easy enough for toddlers to learn.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by WalterBright on Sunday August 02, 2026 @08:11PM (#49149743)

I recall a WW2 documentary where a veteran recounted that he approached a bunker filled with Wehrmacht soldiers. He pointed his gun, and said "raus oder ich scheissen!" The response was laughter. He repeated, and they finally came out, still laughing.

He later realized he should have said "shiessen".

P.S. He confused "shoot" with "shit".

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by Guestmodinfo on Sunday August 02, 2026 @02:21PM (#49146959)

Please someone tell me where to get those 1 million words in decreasing order of difficulty or ascending order of usage along with their meanings and insinuations

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by stevesimmons on Sunday August 02, 2026 @02:26PM (#49146998)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by bilegeek on Sunday August 02, 2026 @02:44PM (#49147161)

Also worth going through the references of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by WalterBright on Sunday August 02, 2026 @02:26PM (#49146996)

Sounds like a job for LLMs.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by mahdi7d1 on Sunday August 02, 2026 @05:02PM (#49148274)

Only if you mean llms finding already compiled lists on the internet. Since they would be too inefficient for actually compiling a list themselves.

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Re:How the words we teach English language learners changed by crazygringo on Sunday August 02, 2026 @10:21PM (#49150501)

Those numbers aren't right.

I don't know what "TV vocabulary" is even supposed to mean... but even if you're talking about just sitcoms it's way more than 2,000 words. You cannot be proficient in a foreign language with just 2,000 words. That's generally considered around the "basic" level of language learning classes, before intermediate and advanced.

A fluent adult generally knows 15,000-30,000 words.

The English language really only has 50,000-60,000 words, depending on how you count them. I have no idea where you got the "million" figure but it's nonsensical. Like it's not even a matter of how many archaic or technical terms you include, it's off by a full order of magnitude no matter what.

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