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Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

Has there been any attempts to 'translate' this into other languages? I'm struggling most often with vocabulary first, whereas the grammar is much easier for me to grasp (programming helps?)

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Well, the base layer of primes references the term “NSM” (which stands for “natural semantic metalanguage”, Wierzbicka and Goddard’s theory which holds, among other things, that there is a universal core of base concepts across languages; the count of 60 such primes coincides with the 2002 iteration; there's also a 14 prime version from 1972 and a 65 prime version from ~2014.)

The layering beyond the primes isn't consistent though, and wouldn't be so much a translation as new work for each language.

Would pay for a Japanese version of this.

Learning words in Japanese could mean:

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.

It's nothing like it but as a beginner, among the best books I've read about vocabulary are the "Madrigal Magic key to X" series of books by Margarita Madrigal. In it, she breaks down how to convert English words into French, German, etc. If I can recall correctly, here are a few simple examples on French:

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.

I was told that there are many English-French false friends.

Vide Casually Explained on French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a69toGGjoO0

Seconded, I _need_ this for German.

The objects in the pictures would need to be built to higher mechanical specifications first. ;)

There is a list of semantic primes on the German Wikipedia, though it seems like it's just a translation from the English words: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantisches_Primitivum

The theory of semantic primes is that they are universal, so (aside from using an older or newer version of the list of primes, like the 14-prime or 65-prime versions instead of the 60-prime version), you'd expect the list for any other language to be equivalent to a translation of the list for whichever language you encountered the list for first.

It's at most the same as this dictionary surely but once you've defined a word and "English", you just say:

Jour. N. The same meaning as the English word 'day'.

I could swear I've seen something alike for Spanish.

I would love this in Spanish and French.

Want for French badly. Would pay.

Several people are writing this. May I ask why? I just don't understand the use case. If you want a list of basic words, take the 60 basic English words and look them up in a French dictionary. But more generally, can't you just look up anything you want in a dictionary?

The use case would be for the teaching and learning of French. Just as this website is for the learning of English.

Yes, we can all look up a few words in the dictionary.

To be honest, I think this website is more about the intellectual challenge of constructing the layered dictionary than about actually providing a learning resource. But that is again because I don't see the point of using this for learning. I'd be interested in someone's concrete thoughts about how/why to use this.

To take an example from elsewhere in this thread, if I encounter the word "gauche" in a French text, I could just look it up in a normal dictionary, or I could look it up in a French multi-layered one and invest some effort into deciphering a French paragraph saying the equivalent of "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."

Sure you can learn such basic terms this way. But why would it be better?

I think the idea is that you would actually study this as a set of lessons to build up the initial vocabulary in a new language for describing things, rather than use it as a word reference.

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