The 1,000 Words challenge

This week saw the launch of the 1,000 Words challenge by Speak to the Future.

Britain has a reputation for being poor at learning foreign languages and the purpose of the campaign is to encourage people to learn 1,000 words of another language.

I think this is a great idea. I enjoy learning foreign languages and agree that the British shouldn't be so lazy and take it for granted that we can speak English when abroad.

The goal of learning  1,000 words of another language would give someone a reasonable vocabulary to to do a reasonable number of tasks. Pareto principle when applied to language is that about 800 words form about 80% of words used in normal conversation. Unfortunately the remaining 20% is made up of about 10,000 other words!

One of the reasons why I think the British are poor at second languages is the poor standard of teaching at schools. I certainly don't have fond memories of learning French at school, in fact I'm amazed looking back that I passed with a good grade. It is only after leaving school and experiencing the world that I've realised that there are other ways to learn a language.

Grammar is critical to language. The 1000 word challenge is all about learning vocabulary yet to use a language you need grammar. With grammar it's possible to communicate very powerful concepts with a limited vocabulary. In fact with only about 500 words you can convey some very adult and complex thoughts.

One of my interests in etymology (the study of language).  I became interested in etymology when I was living in Japan.  When you are a native English speaker you are buried in the language and fail to see it but when I was immersed in a different culture, suddenly English seemed quite odd and I began to ask myself why is it that word? Certain words which once seemed natural suddenly felt  odd and that they shouldn't be there!

I then started to realise that English is in fact mostly made up of words that are not English. German, French, Greek and other language proliferate throughout the English language. 

This has led me to want to help others to learn foreign languages through simple rules.  Cheating if you like.  If English is full of French then it's easy to teach a native English speaker to learn French since they already know thousands of French words. Simple!

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