to see, saw, seen. thing, something, what. this, these. the other, another, else, is the same as, be, am, are, being, was, were. one of. two of. person, people. many of, much of. inside. not, do not, does not, did not, some of. all of. there is, there are. more than, live, alive. big. small. very, kind of. if, then. touch. far from. near to, in a place, someplace, where. above. on a side of, hear, heard. say to, said about. word. true.
12-20. right.
[X is on the right side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people write using the hand they have on this side of their body.
[I use my right hand when I draw pictures.]
12-21. left.
[X is on the left side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people do not write using the hand they have on this side of their body. They write using their other hand.
[My child held my left hand.]
Left is defined this way: [X is on the right side of your body.] = X is on this side of your body: Most people write using the hand they have on this side of their body.
So "on a side of", "people", "be/is", are included in those first 60 words. "body", "write", "hand", etc. are defined after the first 60 words, but before "right" and "left".
(Why do I mention that? Firstly, perhaps it's a fun puzzle for non-native speakers of American English to identify the word. Secondly, it's surprising that a difference between British and US English is apparent in such a short list of such basic words, considering that sometimes it's possible to write whole paragraphs of English without it being apparent which variety of English is being used.)
Google Ngram Viewer lets you compare popularity of words in British vs. American English, so it's useful for investigating this.
I'm en-gb native.
It seems like a very natural thing to want to do with subject-specific glossaries as well. Often when I approach a new topic or hobby I want a glossary of all the jargon up front, and I want the words ordered from least to most demanding of in-knowledge.
You can see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting to see what it actually is. Topological sort is good in dealing with dependency graph. It can turn a dependency graph into a linear ordering of nodes.
GP mentioned topological sort because words depend on other defining words and it's one big directed acyclic graph. Do a topological sort on it and you got a linear list of words ordered by dependency. Group the consecutive words that have no dependency together and you got the word layers. Within each layer all the words don't depend on each other. The words in one layer depend on the words in the lower layers.
Learning how language is spoken from the fundamental 60 words sounds like trying to learn mathematics from its fundamental axioms. It seems like you might just get caught in a long list of definitions where you might be faster off trying to internalise some higher level useful concepts first.
But it's intended as a learning tool and it'll do fine for that.
More like 60 x N , since each of those words can appear arbitrary many times.
I don't think that's true. How would a 60-dimensional vector capture all the syntactic relationships between the words in a complex sentence?
I meant a sequence of one-hot encoded vectors of length 60 could make a good model of English.
The layering beyond the primes isn't consistent though, and wouldn't be so much a translation as new work for each language.
1. learning the sounds and the meaning (using a phonetic script, such as hiragana or romaji - the Latin alphabet) or
2. Learning sound, meaning and kanji (the ideograms)
Learning the kanji is a topic in itself and there are dozens of methods and approaches, but if you like the "start with the most valuable first then build on top of that one bit of knowledge at a time" approach, you might be interested in a project I worked on a while ago: https://prezi.com/m/ihobq38emnq3/env3/
I have flashcards with example sentences up to the first 300 items or so, contact me if you're interested.
1) Words ending with -or: replace the -or with -eur
professor –> professeur, aggressor –> aggreseur
2) Words ending with -ist: just add an e at the end
specialist –> specialiste, artist –> artiste
3) Words ending with -ic: replace it with -ique
romantic –> romantique, fantastic –> fantastique
4) Words ending with -ary: change -ary to -aire
extraordinary –> extraordinaire, solitary –> solitaire
5) Most words ending with -a: replace -a with -e
encyclopedia –> encyclopedie, spatula –> spatule
6) Words that end with, -ine, -ble, -ance, and -ion are also spelled the same way in French.
Vide Casually Explained on French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a69toGGjoO0
Jour. N. The same meaning as the English word 'day'.
Or perhaps with thorough explanations something like this could help bootstrap understanding by a machine?
Having worked with and taught foreign language, nobody learns the first 1,000 words of a language from a same-language dictionary, nor should they.
Children learn from the world; adults learn from classes or a translating dictionary. (Only intermediate/advanced level learners start to use a native dictionary.)
The idea of "bootstrapping" language knowledge from a single dictionary just... isn't going to be necessary for anyone?
All the words it uses are defined within it -- of course with some circularity, but it's heavy on examples and pictures. It was intended for nonnative children taking classes in a style more like native immersion than is typical in schools. I wish more resources followed this philosophy.
We of course did have the benefit of a teacher who would translate if absolutely necessary, but she also insisted on sticking to French in the lessons wherever possible from the very first day. It was far more immersive in my first year of French than e.g. my fourth year of German.
It seemed to work quite well.
It may be the case that the definition A happens to use some word B, in whose definition we find word C, whose definition uses A. However, that isn't really a problem, because these definitions are not simply substitutions of exactly one word for another. The definition of A uses numerous other words other than B, that of B uses words in addition to C, and C uses words in addition to A.
That is, the existence of cycles in definitions doesn't necessarily make the definitions irresolvably circular.
When something burns and becomes many very small dry pieces that moving air can cause to move.
Kind of tree.
One approach would be to mix in grammar bits into the word flashcards. Like:
Flashcard 1: word 1 F 2: word 2 F 3: grammar bit 1 F 4: word 3 ...
You could use the grammar bits provided by English Profile based on the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference): https://www.englishprofile.org/english-grammar-profile/egp-o...
I've seen that done for a different language, though in that case the fully connected component had more than 60 works. I think it was more like 120.
Of course it doesn't make sense to do this competitively because it's so unclear what counts as an adequate definition.
I'm not sure this sort of dictionary would help me learn a language: I think probably not much. But it's definitely fun in a philosophical way.
