Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.)
Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world).
Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.
Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up, with and upon. You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with, set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be separate vocabulary items.
Try it!
1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better.
Or...
Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.
I agree, sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But I don't think I agree that it makes the writing better. I look at language as a form of expression, and some words are just more colorful than others, but it takes all of them to paint a picture. I honestly don't know if I could limit myself to the 1,000 most common words, but I wouldn't want to do that if I could. That said, I'm curious why you think it makes your writing better? Is it that you think more about what you're saying? Or that you think it will be more easily digested by others?
Writing for The Sun was more difficult, since it required keeping a reading age of about 8, and a very distinct style.
That is not surprising, as that's exactly how humans learn to work with language.
Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!")
I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something.
Also, speaking of the propellant used for the Saturn V's F-1 engine he states: "This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power". The propellant in the F-1 engine was RP-1 (kerosene). I assume he was talking about 'town gas' for lighting.
"Richard Feynman - Computer Heuristics Lecture": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
In general, Feynman might be a poster child for using simple language to explain complex things.
To paraphrase an old Andrew Dice Clay quote : "It was like masturbating with a cheese grater. Slightly amusing, but mostly painful."
I lost all interest in the book within five minutes of browsing it.
I'm learning Danish, and reading that is similar, but easier, to deciphering letters from the electricity company.
I attended a school with little to none "secular" education, but I was by nature really curious about things.
At some point, I got my hands on "How Stuff Works", the book[0], and devoured it. It was a super-enlightening book. I'd even venture to say it set me on my autodidactic path to programming.
If this book serves the same purpose for someone as that book did for me, it's benefits cannot be overstated IMO.
As an extra bonus, I was considered by my peers to be far more knowledgable than I actually was, due to having a layman's understanding (or at least the appearance thereof) of _so many_ esoteric concepts. 10/10 would read again!
The PDF link is: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf
The Long Tail of the English Language http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-la...
