How the words we teach English language learners changed | Hacker News Reader

How the words we teach English language learners changed

pudding.cool

255 pointsc-oreills197 comments

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once.

It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer.

If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc.

If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand.

If it's for reading the newspaper, you don't ever need to know "bathroom", but you sure do need to know words like "congressman".

While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.

Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. And the substitutes -- transcribed speech from TV, radio, podcasts, etc. -- is not the same context as the random stuff you say at home and during an average day.

> While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.

Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item.

Otherwise your point is correct; all semantic words are equally difficult and which ones you know depends on the things you like to talk about. Grammatical words are more difficult, and more important, but this is so widely understood that language-learning material already treats them as an entirely separate class of things to learn.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.

(1) You seem to want COCA, which includes a bunch of transcribed telephone calls.

(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.

> you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document

I didn't learn English by reading vocabulary lists or dictionaries. Pretty much all was learned by context.

Yes, but that was a process of over a year that involved being repeatedly presented with real-life scenarios accompanied by verbal descriptions.

If you were to just listen to all the same input, you would never have learned anything. The learning comes from deciphering the connection between the reality you see and the words you hear.

And if you want to understand a document, which is just a sequence of unsupported words, it is equally true that you must already understand almost all of those words.

>(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.

The point of learning by generic word frequency is to optimize study, not to attempt to brute-force understanding. If you have a document in front of you, would you rather have to look up every word in a dictionary, or only every other word?

> If you have a document in front of you, would you rather have to look up every word in a dictionary, or only every other word?

I've been in this situation. There's no real difference between the two circumstances you describe.

OK, what about every fourth word? Every eighth word? If you're going to say that needing a dictionary at all is the same as needing a dictionary for every word, I'm gonna have to call you a liar.

I don't really understand what you're trying to measure. I can make some comments about different things you might mean:

--- 1 ---

Say you are presented with a politician's speech on some topic, topic X. Your background vocabulary is such that, out of the unique lemmas present in the speech, you know about 7/8 of them.

Without a dictionary, you aren't that likely to be able to answer basic questions like "is this politician for, or against, topic X?". With a dictionary, this will improve.

--- 2 ---

If you need a dictionary for every word in a document, that means you don't know any of the grammar of that language, and regardless of how much dictionary access you have, you're not going to be able to understand the document.

--- 3 ---

If we're glossing over grammatical particles, and you're allowed to use a dictionary, then this is a question of speed. The differences aren't as significant as you seem to think. A major reason for this is that words get repeated; if you need to look up a previously unknown word the first time you encounter it, you probably don't need to look it up the third time. Your reading speed will start slow and increase very rapidly, as long as you keep reading about the same kinds of things (for example, because you're reading a single document).

Put another way, the process of starting to read a document will convert you from a stylized "every other word" to a stylized "every tenth word" within a short time.

I tried to teach 'magicE vocab', sorting them by difficulty level for an English language plan, and got them easily arranged. For example, sham/shame and slide/slid are for hard to learn level, while ate, pale, kite, are for the easy level.

Kinda like how there's no average-sized airplane pilot

I think a lot about this. It's funny how there are certain domains of language, familiar to all native speakers, but that you are simply not likely to learn as an adult language learner, at least not without diligent and focused study.

I live and work in a foreign country, and have a modest but functional grasp of the language here. Which is to say, I know how to say 'sustainability', 'union-negotiated collective agreement', and 'offensive conduct in the workplace'.... but if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.

When you're a foreigner learning a language your experience is mostly from reading. There are words, however, that are much more common at home and in spoken language. So you'll probably never learn the words that a 10 year old kid knows.

It is changing. A bulk of learners now get their vocabularies from youtube, netflix and podcasts. Watching kids shows is common recommendation (I disagree with it somewhat, but that does not make it not common), so I think people will learn also those 10 years old world words.

I started learning english around 1984, when I began to learn programming. Back then most books were, by very far, in english. I also spent some time in the US (about one year altogether).

Copying lyrics from my favorite songs of the 80s was helpful. And then later on TV series and movies in english.

I've watched Friends, HIMYM and Californication* more than once (it's probably the reason I swear so much) and those really helped.

Now I raised my kid in english: from the beginning she was only ever allowed to watch TV shows in english. And she's always been to international schools, in english too.

The other day she taught me a simply word which, surprisingly enough, I didn't know: a "coaster" (a drink coaster).

My absolute favorite is when she uses english grammar and applies it to french: the rules about where adjectives do go vary between french and english and she regularly messes it up in french (supposedly her "native" language but at this point I wonder whether english ain't a first language, and french second).

And one thing she has that I'll never have is a beautiful, proper, english accent. Mine shall forever be a strong french one.

My wife kept up her english via friends. And I am always surprised how much US cultural exports help people learn the language.

A French accent in English is easy to mock but it actually sounds pretty good. My American accent in Spanish sounds atrocious and sadly our bilingual kids have pretty American accents too. But honestly who cares?

Speaking another language is the best effort I have ever made (I am lucky not to do it out of necessity). Totally changed my world view and how I think, speak, read and dream. Though please do not make me listen to a recording of my own voice…

One subtle issue in learning words from reading is that with languages like English where there's ambiguity in how to pronounce a given spelling, sometimes you might not guess the correct pronunciation for words you learned. This isn't specific to learning non-native languages either; growing up I read a lot and learned most of my advanced vocabulary that way, so as a teenager I would often find out that I didn't pronounce a word correctly because I had only ever seen it written down before.

There's a quote I've come across before, never make fun of someone mispronouncing a word in English, because it's a sign they are a reader.

I was in my 30s when I learned "ennui" was pronounced "on wee" rather than N-U-I. I did not know it was from French. No shame. I never spoke the word aloud, but used it in writing. A teenager I knew was studying for a vocab test and had to learn the word, and I overheard him flash carding. Pronounced it "on-wee" and my brain exploded.

Interesting example in this context because "ennui" looks French, which may help someone with the pronunciation or spelling depending on needs. It's not a word I've come across much before though, if ever?

It means: tedium, boredom, "A feeling of weariness and disgust; dullness"

Thanks for the teachable moment!

I've always assumed it was a loan word from French, but I honestly also have never been properly able to figure out how to pronounce arbitrary words in French because I'm not familiar enough with the language. My perception is that the pronunciation for it is fairly regular, but I'd still need to take the time to learn it, and unless I actually spent the time to fully learn and practice French, I doubt I'd end up remembering the pronunciation rules anyways.

I thought it might be Greek, a language all Americans butcher constantly.

I think Gen Z will know the word bc one of the emotions in Pixar's Inside Out 2 was named Ennui and walked around with a French accent doing pretty much nothing :D

It's kinda funny. My life switched to English when I was around 18 and, while my family still speaks my native language exclusively, everything I've learned since then I don't know how to say it in my native language.

Just earlier I was talking to them, trying to say "when life gives you lemons" and being unable to find an equivalent phrase. I hope they understood my lemons reference regardless.

Words like cedar/robin/linen come from either the physical or cultral environment that I (as a Chinese) wasn't exposed to when I was a child. Cedar and robin are all species native to Europe, and I guess they also appear in many Western fairy tales or historical stories.

Also, both because of the familiarity and how English form words, English assign very specific non-compound words to them (rather than "xxx tree/bird"), making it more difficult for people from a completely different language family to learn them.

But of course this is not only English. In Chinese a child is taught to act 孝 (filial piety, respect and obedience to parents) and know how your uncles 舅 (mother's brother) 伯 (father's elder brother) 叔 (father's younger brother) relate to your parents. I'm sure it's OK for a foreign learner not to master them.

Cedars, fwiw, are not found in most of Europe either. Small parts of the Mediterranean (also parts of the Himalayas, bizarrely; closer than you think!)

They likely show up in Western works a lot because they’re mentioned in the bible a good bit.

"...how your uncles 舅 (mother's brother) 伯 (father's elder brother) 叔 (father's younger brother) relate to your parents."

These words are likely also on their way out, when you consider how few people in China have uncles in the present generation.

> if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.

Indeed. I'm American but my family has spoken German in the USA uninterrupted for 200 years. I speak German with my kids. But there's a children's song called Alle Vögel sind schon da and another called die Vogelhochzeit that I listen to with my kids, and it's just a litany of bird species I do not know but, being in a kid's song, I assume means they are common words for German kids.

When I look them up, the English words are ones I've heard and know from context are birds, but I couldn't tell you what they are like, and I would never use the word in English when asked about birds. My go-tos would be mockingbird, cardinal, hummingbird...ones I see in my backyard and have seen my entire life.

There is also a whole different language used to talk to toddlers and small children that native speakers know but very few adult learners ever pick up. And slang used among teenagers and young adults that often times not even their parents understand fully.

The problem with adding slang to any organised education program is two-fold: some of it changes much more quickly than you course materials can, and much of it is quite localised.

I recently discovered that even high-level non-native speakers do not know the term "fraidy cat."

Well, I didn't know the term until I looked it up just now (though the meaning was obvious enough). It appears to be a US term.

Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.

For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.

It always made me question if Americans in contrast to the British are a bit afraid to be precise.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Sokath! His eyes uncovered!

Interesting perspective, I'm used to seeing the exact opposite observation, that British people are famous for saying things meant as insults that sound positive at a surface level and that people are often unsure if they're being mocked/ridiculed or not.

Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.

Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean "Good idea, let's do it, or at least consider it seriously." But "Interesting idea" is likely to mean "You're an idiot."

This is more corporate/middle class.

There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extreme insults are actually meant affectionately.

Even more confusingly, the two can overlap, and the same people will switch between them - sometimes in the same setting - with relative equals.

Americans don't seem to do understatement. "My business died" becomes "My incredible journey." Relationships are cross-bred with hustle, so you can be friends with someone and they'll ask you to invest in their MLM scheme.

Instead of using understatement US corporate speaks uses noise to act out hierarchy, to gaslight and to misdirect.

I was talking to someone today who was asked to produce a report. They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived.

The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.

It's all very David Graeber. So far as I can tell the US seems to specialise in situations where corporate insanity is happening but the sharp edges have been filed off, so it looks like productive activity higher up the pyramid.

> They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived. The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.

That is surreal.

> Americans don't seem to do understatement.

Brits say this all the time because they assume we talk like people in movies and interviews do (or they interpret corporate-speak as how Americans actually talk). We use understatement plenty. In fact, the "interesting idea" understatement? I wouldn't even clock it as British because we use that in the US, too. I would say it is a classic example we use here of how you politely call an idea stupid. "Hm, interesting." We don't usually say "that's a stupid idea." That would be extremely rude.

I encounter this same attitude vis a vis Brits and sarcasm. "Oh, Americans don't get sarcasm." We absolutely do get sarcasm (insert claim Brits are being sarcastic when they say we don't get it). Britain is not special in this regard. It boggles the mind why Brits think we don't understand it. The languages are not so far gone.

I tell ya what, "understatement of the year" was not a phrase coined to describe something a Brit said.

You also find observers outside the Anglosphere describing understatement not as a British thing, but an anglophonic thing, including in American speech. https://www.identitytheory.com/anna-wierzbickas-english-mean...

I would go so far as to say that the hedges famous to American English opinion sharing is an example of understatement. "I feel like XYZ" is an Americanism, and it's understatement to the point of re-catorizing a fact as an opinion in order to soften your speech.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard a Texan describe extremely hot weather as "a bit warm."

Examples abound.

(We also bust balls with our friends, and it lines up with class the same way you describe, including code switching between two registers.)

Code switching between registers is a fact of life in America. Nobody speaks corporate natively, and it's more extreme if you grow up or live in an ethnic minority enclave.

What Americans tend to not "get" is how dry British humor can be. It's less about not getting sarcasm and more just not finding it as funny. Personally, I blame the number of ads that interrupt our TV shows back when people watched broadcast and cable TV. There really wasn't enough time to build up and the ads are too loud and shouty in comparison.

I think that it's often true that Americans don't get British sarcasm. And it's similarly often true that British people don't get American sarcasm.

Seems like an extremely reductive and negative take on what is "American". Perhaps you've only experienced America via LinkedIn and a specific shitty company?

>Interesting perspective

I see what you did there!

Here is British comedian David Mitchell complaining about the same kind of vagueness in British corporate culture.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=67QsrpNH96Q

I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.

English tends to just borrow/steal words from other languages if they're useful enough. It could also be something to do with the lack of consistency of english rules so it's not so easy to create new words.

You can wordificate cromulent lexemes with abandon. The English language don't care.

any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough

— <https://blog.linguisten.de/post/183704949120/any-noun-can-be...>

English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.

I wonder if despite our large vocabulary, English speakers tend to use a small subsection of it because there are so many non-native speakers. It seems to me from reading and watching people from decades ago that the language was more complex. (I don't mean this as any knock on people who speak English as a second language.)

We don't use most of them because no one could learn them all. There's more than 100,000 hanzi recorded in Chinese. Some quick googling suggests educated Chinese people know 8,000, and the average Chinese person knows around 3,500.

So 3–8%.

Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D

Sounds... load bearing. Worse than being called pretentious, someone's gonna come along accuse you of being an LLM if you use words that aren't part of the normal lexicon.

Utilizing a breadth of vocabulary won't evince your being an LLM. None have such a habitude. You'll merely attract invidious barbed tonguelets.

> you almost never hear it said where English is that language

I'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:

1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"

2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong

> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.

This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.

As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone you monologue at them.

English uses a lot of prepositional phrase idioms. Now that I'm learning Japanese, I find there are relatively few like that (although not zero, compare "と相談" to discuss with and に相談" to consult). But it instead uses many, many compound verb expressions that are often not intiutive to a learner and just have to be memorized, so the effect is similar.

It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reject, to ask permission), and 適当 (tekitou, suitable, appropriate, half-assed, careless).

Thanks. I'm learning Japanese too. The other day I learned that 在る can be used with either で or に and didn't make this connection, though I guess whether it counts as different meanings depends on how you look at it, since in both cases you're specifying the position in spacetime of something.

> [Japanese] also has words with opposite meanings

These are known as contronyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym).

Thank you! It's funny how I have never thought of most of these. The only similar word I could think of was "biweekly".

This is a feature among the Germanic languages (of which English is one).

In German, these are called splittable verbs, and they can appear in two forms: "upstep" and "step up," depending on the sentence structure. That makes "upstep" / "step up" seem more like a separate verb from "step," rather than just being the same verb with an adverb added on.

My German teachers translated "trennbare Verben" as "separable verbs":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb

These are called phrasal verbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs

When I started dating someone whose second language was English, I found that the idioms were a giant hurdle. We really do speak in idioms and metaphors and this makes it very difficult for people who understand the words but not the cultural context. While my (now spouse) adapted, I also adapted by learning how to speak far more literally, especially around people of mixed levels of English.

I don't think there is a fear of being imprecise. If anything, it is a fear of speaking plainly as boring.

In your experience, would you say that your communication has become more precise?

Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.

I don't think my communication became more precise. Language is imprecise and in these cases (ESL), you are also limiting your vocabulary. (Especially when I moved outside the US - while I was around very educated people who studied for the GRE, learning a word is not the same as digesting all connotations.

So in social communication, you aren't getting more precise -- in many cases, you're getting less precise and taking more words to handle that. Consider the idiom "shit or get off the pot." You can say that "Make a decision" is less precise. "Do it or don't" is also an idiom but doesn't express the frustration that the vulgarity does. "I am frustrated and need you to either take action or shut up" is more direct and possibly more offensive because it takes formality.

And then there's the prefix of "Sometimes you need to" that turns it from a command to advice. "Sometimes you need to either take action or stop complaining" sounds like the emphasis is on "you" instead of the predicate as if it's a critique of the person, whereas the idiom gives more of a proverb connotation.

The problem is that language carries many layers and "more precise" is a goal in technical communication but neglects the other layers.

Have a butchers at my China who thinks the seppos are less precise.

I read some articles the other day about rhyming slang. It all made sense of course, that it's a thing in some cultures. But most rhyming slangs are part of Cants or other special purpose vocabs which often have the intent of obscuring meaning.

But none of that answered why in the absolute world a group would choose to initiate a rhyming slang for things such as the damn stairs. Rhyming slang is purposely obscuring.

It's insane to me, that cockney is half made up of purposely making communication more difficult or insular. Like, I get that there's complicated in group signalling incentives at play, but like, why?

> For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.

First, most native English speakers have an execrable vocabulary. I seem to remember that most people use less than 2000 (generally much less) unique words when they talk to each other. There is a high probability that they simply don't know the right word.

Second, using the same word over and over again gets monotonous. Using colorful idioms and metaphors is often necessary to keep people's attention. This is triply true in this day and age of mayfly-like attention spans.

Finally, if I'm teaching something, I'm probably trying to give you 3 or 4 different ways to think about the subject in the hope that one of them resonates and clicks so you understand. I don't know a priori which one that will be, so my vocabulary needs to shift in the hope of getting the point across.

Its cause its fun

After years of reading technical and scientific materials, listening to lectures and youtube tutorials and learning English exclusively through them I hit a wall when I watched a cooking youtube video for the first time.

I was pretty confident in my English but I couldn't understand half of the sentences since I didn't know any of the vocabulary related to cooking. From tools (spatula) to ingredients (parsley) or even actions (frying). My delusions of proficiency shattered as I found out my everyday vocabulary is smaller than an elementary schooler.

I read years ago that:

1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words

2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words

3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words

4. English language has 1,000,000 words

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

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

Sounds like a job for LLMs.

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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.

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!"

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

> That isn't generally applicable to all languages.

I'm skeptical of that claim.

Put volume!

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

Me go market, find juice, say sugar free

nice! sugar free!

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

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

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.

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".

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc. (In most cases that would not be considered ethical today!)

The gold standard is something like: get acculturated to the language community you wish to study, make some acquaintances and friends, somehow finagle an invite to their homes or workplaces or social venues, and then with their permission, record their conversations as unobtrusively as you can.

There is so little data on how language is really used it is quite bedevilling. As soon as people know you are listening they change how they speak.

This is one upside of the digital panopticon, I guess.

That's what I discovered religion is for, understand the language as it was created.

Ever wonder who decides what's self-explanatory and what resonates?

What?

> Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc.

Hence the common phrase, found in most language phrasebooks: “is that a linguist hiding behind that bush?”

Im working this into some conversation this week. I feel its something Douglas Adams would have wrote.

> “is that a linguist hiding behind that bush?”

No, a FAANG employee. /s

That’s what makes ethnolinguistics fascinating. As a native French speaker, I started getting interested by linguistics when I learned Italian, and now I keep noting things I never thought about when I talk with other native French speakers. As someone said, “You don’t know your language until you know another one”.

Its um like you know whatever

Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only store the individual set of words spoken without any ordering, so it would be impossible to reconstruct the actual content of anyone's conversations.

Universities in certain countries have strict ethical standards that require consent and crediting informants. These standards were often inspired by working with indigenous informants, who were viewed as having been historically exploited in the collection of data, but they apply now to anyone eliciting data from anyone.

What is the practical harm that is actually being avoided here?

When people speak in public, they assume that other people around them can overhear what they're saying. This is just gathering anonymous statistics about word use. It's hard to imagine how there's any real downside for anyone here.

The word set is enough to identify some people based on speech patterns or interests. The inclusion of other words in the set — cocaine, divorce, abortion, merger, lymphoma — would make many people uncomfortable.

In a perfect world, it wouldn't be. Personally, if I knew an infallible person was recording my private conversation and anonymising it to an acceptable degree, I wouldn't care. For example, by removing personal identifiers and aggregating the data across a topic such as "conversations at cafes in central Paris in 2026".

But the second there is doubt about security across any link in the chain from raw recording to anonymisation and storage, I would no longer consent.

> If it's for reading the newspaper, you don't ever need to know "bathroom", but you sure do need to know words like "congressman".

Unless you're reading a newspaper from the last 5 years or so - in which case, the word "bathroom" becomes surprisingly more relevant.

>Retired radio shock jock Alan Jones′ influence and reputation survived one arrest, in a London public toilet in 1988.

Always has been.

Oh, this is such a fun rabbit hole.

There are plenty of programmers who can write a commit message in almost perfect English, yet don't know the difference between lettuce and radish, and can't tell what a little sheep is called.

My favorite area to catch people on is religion. Many C1 English speakers who grew up religious, some of whom are still devout and go to Church every Sunday, would be unable to hold even a basic conversation about their religion in English.

The unfortunate side of this is how non-native speakers of English swear much more often. I got better at it, but I suspect I'd still struggle in American corporate culture.

I see another problem being that the same words can have different meaning or intent in different contexts and particularly with different intonations and facial expressions.

> The “Social-Communicative” level barely changed in size. But nearly a quarter of the words in the 1953 list are gone, and 39% of the 2023 words are new. Humble, loyalty, fellowship, generous, polite, and companionship gave way to community, identity, organization, ethnic, gender, and narrative. ...It offers fewer words for the people directly around you, but more for belonging at a distance.

I would blame inequality on this one. In a more unequal world tribalization is a survival strategy and language follows.

When you see everybody else as your equals then focusing on describing that individual person, instead of their group, makes more sense.

Economic inequality affects deeply how we think about others.

I would blame it more on globalization.

In 1953 people were not exposed as much to different groups of people far away.

I can't quite follow your point. Are you saying there is more inequality today than in 1953?

From 1945 to 1980 inequality was the lowest in the USA. From 1980 onward economic inequality exploded. I understand that you cannot follow my point without this important piece of information.

So you're talking strictly about economic inequality. Because in 1953 we were still 10 years away from the end of legal segregation.

By the eay things are going, we may be 10 or less years away from legal resegration. The administration is actively working on that.

I don't follow your reasoning at all. It's a shift and what people talk about and write about. It can't be anything more than that, by construction.

What I see is shifting from a focus on individuals and close personal relationships to a focus on the functioning of society and, well, identity.

It seems like a swing of the pendulum to me. Encouraging people to create their own identities, creating vocabulary to describe one's identity, and advocating for a restructuring around society that is relatively collectivized economically, but culturally celebrates individual diversity. I'm not a professional historian, but I think that's somewhat of a new phenomenon historically.

And it's clearly a reaction to the perception that the ideals of equality and being uniformly kind to each other we're not enough to bring about a just and equitable society, and if anything were abused in order to suppress diversity. We still have to be kind to each other at a basic level, but it's not enough anymore.

So maybe now there's too much focus on that stuff and not enough focus on the part where you should actually just be nice to your neighbors and be humble and all that. Or, maybe people are disproportionately writing about it, because it's a new thing, and a lot of people know a lot to say about it, and a lot of people want to talk about it.

I don't think it makes a shred of sense to conclude that somehow the world is now more equal than it was in the 50s. It's disappointingly far from equal, though, and I think the change in lexicon is a change in people's focus specifically because the old system clearly wasn't working, and people are eager to try something different.

When I was in high school at a private school, I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity. I got into a debate with basically my whole class about how languages shift and change over time, and everyone was saying that languages stay the same and that they were all determined at the Tower of Babel.

I used the examples of Latin to Spanish and English, or Old English to new English.

I say that to say, languages changing over time is to some people not actually something they believe happens. The facts are right there in front of you, but some people cannot have their minds changed no matter how much sense you make.

Huh, English has changed perceptibly over just my lifetime.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

Most people can't accept reality.

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime

? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible.

> Jesus Freaks

That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

"perceptibly" perhaps not so much? blue eyes are definitely newer.

pale skin perhaps only after agriculture replaced meat eating for D3 production.

despite what Sliders intimated, Europeans are more Cro-mag than 'thals ;)

> I doubt we're perceptibly different

If you're around various ethnic groups long enough, you'll start recognizing which group a person you are unacquainted with belongs to. And I don't mean the obvious differences.

Sort of like "My Fair Lady" where the linguist could tell where a person came from by the way they spoke.

Are you claiming there are evolutionary differences to race?

> ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans

Acktually (push glasses) selective breeding is a form of evolution and it takes only a few generations to see perceptible changes.

There's a whole industry of cat breeders going from wild cat servals to domesticated house cat, giving them an F number for how many generations they've been bred away from wild cat.

There are many well documented cases of rapid evolution: a population of African elephants became 50% tuskless at birth in a single generation, urban fox anatomy diverged from rural, frogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turned black, the Peppered Moth turned black in the industrial revolution.

Here’s one verse from the Bible itself that shows that language changed: 1 Samuel 9:9:

> (Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he said, “Come, let us go to the seer”; for he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer.)

I love that one because it translates so well into English because we also have an older and a newer word for close enough to the same thing. Though when saying older and newer I should note that the words “prophet” and “seer” have been used consistently since the very first English translation, Wycliffe’s in ~1382. Maybe it’s more the feel of the words. (In Bible Gateway’s catalogue of English translations, only the CEV doesn’t use both of those words: <https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1sam9.9>; I disqualify OJB as not English.)

That’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head that’s specifically about language, but there are plenty of others about changed customs over time, in Old and New Testaments.

Arguably the CEV version is clearer, because approximately no-one knows the difference between ‘prophet’ and ‘seer’ in English (a seer is a practitioner of divination). I’m assuming that the distinction was similar in the original (ie that the original didn’t just use two words for the same thing).

There's a very easy way out for them: Just claim that the bible is rather metaphorical than literal, and many things can be interpreted to be in line with scientific findings. That seems to be at least what protestant churches in Europe seem to do.

Easy for you to say, but who says they're looking for a way out? It's often easier to find a reason to stay where you are, and easiest to not even need one.

> I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity

That seems like a given. If you're curious, you'll soon see through any ideology you were spoon-fed as a child, religious or otherwise.

You're talking about ignorant teenagers. Is there more proof that large groups of people don't believe languages change over time?

Useless, obnoxious, absolutely frustrating Scrolljacker? Straight to jail.

I thought the same thing.

I tried to build a similar list myself for German and it's not easy as just taking a lot of content and counting frequency. I also haven't found existing curated lists of most useful vocabulary.

There are some databases but e.g. they are biased towards Wikipedia and web which makes some very obscure words at the top of popularity (like some technical words which are present on each wiki page like Datenschutz or Impressum).

Another commenter mentioned that enWiktionary[1] has some, and I also found a dewp article[2].

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Ge...

[2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequenzwörterbuch

All that time spent programming those visuals. Which, I think, ironically, have made the article harder to read, not easier.

But you’re more likely to remember it. It’s not trying to be easier.

The author mentions various categories grew or shrank, but always in percentages. Since the list also grew from 2300 to 2800 words that feels like it might distort things a bit: in absolute word count, a category that shrank by 1% lost fewer words than a category that grew by 1% would have gained, no?

Having said that, the categories that shrank all did so by a big enough percentage to also shrink in absolute number of words, so at least that isn't a problem.

always hated this style of web presentation.

This is the worse I have seen.

Most of these kind of website have the animation on the centre of the screen. This one animate at the bottom

this is particularly bad

> But also: apple didn’t make the new list. Neither did fork, soap, umbrella or leaf, for example. It’s not that these things vanished from everyday life, but many hands-on words became less central to the core vocabulary.

I do not understand what this article is about. Clearly anyone learning English needs to know the word "fork".

The article is essentially saying that the new list is more advanced than the old list. Okay? That's not interesting.

It's changed so much I can't even parse the title.

Evidently grammar's become slacker

We have america to thank for that.

I still cannot get my head around what is "lunch", "supper", and "dinner" - and how this was explained to me at school was different from reality, also depending on the country where you are in :-)

No English school teaches you this, only real practice.

Dinner originally had a meaning like "biggest meal of the day". That used to be midday, culturally shifted to the evening. In some places and some contexts the language followed but not in every case. In southern England dinner is typically in the evening but we still say "school dinners" for subsidised lunches and "dinner ladies" for the women who serve them.

Supper has always meant evening as far as I know but referring to the evening meal as supper became a marker first of the upper class and then of pretension. Hearing someone say supper is quite jarring for me.

I'm not sure the folks down the chippy ordering a "fish supper" were trying to be pretentious!

When I was growing up, "Supper's ready" was a common phrase. I think it is more common in the Anglosphere. Of course, my family is of English extraction so that might be why.

Wait til you find out that in Northern England, we call the evening meal "tea", not to be confused with "tea", the delicious leaf water.

> It’s as if the world now requires you to be more precise about everything.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about. We have trended from subjective language to objective language. Why?

Computing. Software is written with objective language. Everything is clearly unambiguously defined. Blue is no longer a category, it's #0000FF. Logic must always reduce to a binary truth value. Most of what we have to talk about is somehow relative to software. Software even structures most of what we write! We don't just talk to each other, we tweet, email, message, post, search, etc. These structures each imply a specific set of phrase structures that can make sense.

Lately, it's hard to go even a day without reading some complaint that such and such was written by "AI" (an LLM). Why is this so obvious? Well, the core advantage that LLMs provide is that they don't compute. Inside an LLM, there is no arithmetic, no logical branches, no truth values. Phrases aren't generated to define or to resolve. They are generated to continue. Sure, we can direct the story to follow the steps of logical deduction, but that isn't anything like calculation. An LLM simply isn't invested in logic, precision, correctness, etc. the way we expect modern writers to be. It's not the em-dashes or the word choice that illustrates this, it's the fundamental perspective of the system.

We are sorely missing subjectivity. Natural language never was, and never will be, computable. You can't reduce a natural story to binary truth values without choosing an arbitrary perspective that resolves its ambiguity. The more precisely abstract our language gets, the more detached from reality our stories become. The more objective our assertions about reality are, the less relevant they can be.

My answer to this is to make the arbitrary choice of perspective a first-class feature. If we can explicitly decide what meaning is relevant, we should be able to weakly solve natural language processing. It seems like a pretty simple and obvious idea, but so far is easier said than done.

Eh, this seems somewhat right, but somewhat not right either.

Language has to do with our Monkeysphere, that humans over long periods of time in the past were limited to a very small subset of people they interacted with socially and closely. A few institutions likely had a large effect on your language like the church depending on where you were. After that it was the people you interacted with to stay alive. Because almost everything was in person or person to person transfer of information a lot of socially encoded clues were involved which lessened the need for well defined words.

Books were the first stage of homogenizing language as they could be shared over long distances and to many people, but more sequentially than latter forms of communication. After that radio and TV had a huge effect, for example the 'General American' used in broadcasts that was based heavily on a midwestern accent.

As we encroached on the 70s and 80s the previous technological advances and things like high speed interstates and trucking shrank America to something you could drive across in less than a week, and you could reach anywhere by voice nearly instantly. Suddenly people in California, Texas and New York all could be in the same meetings and local colloquialisms would need explained, so people would trend to a shared vocabulary.

It's also odd to me to say an LLM isn't subjective. Each LLM has it's own behavior, it's that there are like 20 or 30 big LLMs in all, and people are using them millions to billions of time so we're getting that one LLMs language everywhere. And that's why I disagree and will say natural language is computable, but it's also lossy and probabilistic. And for the most part it's single prompt and being ran by the user for the cheapest price possible.

> It's also odd to me to say an LLM isn't subjective.

I was saying the opposite. The core feature of an LLM is that it is subjective. The implications of a written expression (prompt) are not well-defined objective truth, but instead a vague probability. We can compute the probability, but that doesn't ever intersect with logical reduction or arithmetic; so the implications we get are just vague guesses on the progression of the story. With enough examples and training, the LLM can guess correct arithmetic answers, but critically, it does not actually perform the arithmetic that verifies them.

I don't agree with the assumed equivalence between precision and objectivity. Language can be precise when describing a subjective perspective, and it can be imprecise or ambiguous when describing objective facts. The tendency toward increasing precision is a good thing, in my opinion. If anything, precision in language allows writers to tell better, more nuanced stories about subjectivity.

Increasing precision is good to the end that is disambiguation. The problem is that that end is not always what language is good for. Metaphor is an incredibly useful tool, because it allows us to convey meaning with imprecise definition, but precise implications.

The meaning of an expression is its implication, not its definition. The implication must be decided by the reader. This is either done by strict definition, or by arbitrary inference. Inference is a powerful feature of language, because it expands the set implications that can be expressed without abstracting the language. Without inference and metaphor, we must instead create a tower of well-defined abstractions that rule over us; having already determined what implications are relevant: objective truth. With inference and metaphor, the writer/speaker can articulate their implications with familiar language; relying on the reader/listener to infer from the expected relevant perspective: subjective truth.

Essentially the tradeoff isn't whether or not you get precision, but whether that precision can be shared by the writer and the reader, or be managed entirely by the writer. Defined abstractions allow the writer to be unambiguous to anyone (objective), while inference allows the writer to offload that responsibility to the context and perspective of the reader (subjective).

Does that make sense?

Yes that makes sense, and I think I mostly agree with you. The point about metaphors is a good one, but what I would say is that often the most precise way to communicate something is through a metaphor. If the goal is to convey a mood or a feeling, there's no way to take the metaphor and make it more precise using more words, because an essential part of it is brevity. The intended effect is lost if you try to turn it into an academic paper. I think this is exactly your point, so maybe we're just using "precise" in a slightly different sense.

> the most precise way to communicate something is through a metaphor.

> I think this is exactly your point

Yes, it is.

Another useful word would be "direct", or maybe "concrete". A metaphor allows us to get right to the point, instead of going up the ladder of abstraction. Alternatively, we can use well-defined abstractions, like formal mathematics, to be precise in an abstract way.

I tried to lay it out, but I'm (ironically) using objectively defined abstractions to do so...

Metaphor is what allows a story's implications to be taken out of an expression, and placed into the interpreter itself. An interpreter that arbitrarily decides what an expression can mean does so by bringing its own implications. This way, instead of forcing an expression to articulate those implications, the expression can imply them instead. The interpreter fills in the gap.

If we formalize a story's implications, that means we create a decided interpreter: a collection of assumptions that impose a specific perspective on the reader. This is how programming languages work: any expression has a clearly defined meaning, because it will only be given to that language's interpreter. The disadvantage is that you cannot write ambiguous expressions, because ambiguity would require the potential for more than one perspective, which would require more than one interpreter.

My idea is to create many ad-hoc interpreters, so that any of them can be chosen to interpret a given expression. This way, the chosen perspective is computable, while the expression can be ambiguous and metaphorical. The only "hard" problem left is the selection of interpreter, which I expect to be manageable.

>> We have trended from subjective language to objective language. Why?

Alternative theory: asynchronous communication.

It used to be your speech stayed with you, and if you were unprecise, or misspoke, or was caught meandering off-topic, people could just ask you and you would clarify. With exception for authors and journalists, that were explicitly taught how to write.

Now, your speech stays while you leave, so you have to construct as precise of an image as you can. If you misspoke or said something wrong, people have to engage with your speech as-is.

People can ask you to clarify online, of course. But you have to build a solid foundation, before people even start to think that they could benefit from a few clarifications.

That's another useful perspective on the same thing I'm talking about.

Your speech doesn't just fail to stay with you, it's implications hang over you. What you have said is treated structurally like a magical incantation: directly relevant to reality itself, no matter how little sense comes out of that relationship. This is the vain objectivity I'm talking about: everything you say is interpreted as if you meant to state an objective fact.

Context is a fundamental feature of communication. Objectivity just means factoring as much context as we can out of the interpreter, and into the expression. It's a useful tradeoff, but it has limitations. At some point, there must be subjective interpretation. Without it, you are just talking to a brick wall.

It's interesting reading the comments criticising this page's scroll behaviour. I didn't realize how many people scroll webpages without a mouse... This is good to know!

Trying to read this article by paging through it with the spacebar is ... absolutely impossible.

I'm not going to finger-scroll or down-arrow the whole thing.

Don't break scrolling. Please.

I thought it was one of those paywalls that give you a taste. Since it wasn't enough for me to pay I was going for close when more came up. Only then did I realize what was going on. It was still annoying enough give up after a few more pages.

A new fad I've seen more and more lately is removing the scroll bars. Arrgh.

Not only have they killed the scrollbar, but they've attempted to kill my scrollbar-killing rant: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511>.

That seems not to be available at either the Internet Archive nor Archive Today:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20200000000000*/https://ello.co/...>

<https://archive.is/https%3A%2F%2Fello.co%2Fdredmorbius%2Fpos...>

Sic transit gloria data.

Update: At least some of the Wayback captures have the actual page content if you view source. See for example: <https://web.archive.org/web/20210524202824/https://ello.co/d...>.

(Another reason I'm pretty salty about breaking basic HTML page functionality for slick trix.)

My Mac mini has that wretched problem with every window.

I love that English is the lingua franca and that the phrase "lingua franca" is well understood in English, enough to be legitemately "an english word" (so to speak).

The whole "we have a word for that" carries the seeds of it's own destruction. English does too: it's the same word.

Why keen?

Interesting one if you look at Google Ngram Viewer – usage dropped off massively to 70s/80s, and it's picked back up since but not to 1953 or earlier levels, so even that doesn't explain it.

Must just be the combination of that increase as well as other words decreasing in usage I suppose. E.g. perhaps we're a bit less keen, but also much less passionate, so keen ends up making the cut.

As a native English speaker, keen feels like a very 1950s TV word. Don't know if that's actually true but feels like that way. I expect you're more likely to hear like cool today are some more contemporary word.

Brits still use the word somewhat frequently, though I haven’t bumped into many of them in the last ten years.

Right, as far as live exposure, I associate its usage with UK/AU/NZ expats in my western US, academic R&D microcosm.

Yeah, I guess I can also see it as more of a Britishism (etc.) currently.

Keen is definitely a word but when used to describe a person it’s often a bit of a backhanded compliment… you don’t really want to be keen.

Saying "I'm keen to do x" or "he's keen to do y" is a fairly common normal usage but having said that, wouldn't normally be my first choice of language as a millennial, maybe does sound a bit old fashioned

“It offers fewer words for the people directly around you, but more for belonging at a distance” - the further I get into this article the more it just seems like sampling bias as a narrative.

It's a wordy (/AI?) way to say it, but I took it to be commenting on our lives being more 'abstract'/digital than they were, so naturally a lot of our language is less physical.

Oughtn't really affect emotive language like 'keen', though.

I'm also a native English speaker, sounds perfectly normal & commonplace to me.

Still in common use in Britain as far as I know. A more local (Bristolian) word would be "keener" used to describe someone who puts lots of effort into a task to win praise.

In Canada I hear keener more often than keen (although both are rare).

It's still used in a couple of specific senses - it's used in the nearly fixed phrases "keen edge" or "keen mind" as a synonym for "sharp", and as "to be keen to -" to mean "eager". But, in my experience, it's rarely used to mean grieving ("to keen over -"), and almost never as a generic term of approval ("that's real keen").

It's used in Australia. "who's keen for some beers?", "keen as", etc

Point your Duck at "VOA Special English"

My mum learned watching cowboy TV in the 60s and 70s. She's got some uh colloquialisms for sure

I mean the subject is interesting but I have the say the design of the page is not only janky and needlessly complicated with animations.

Man this pudding is a cool publication : ) Thanks for this.

Every time I come across a pudding article, it stops me in my tracks. They're always so rewarding!

Reader mode required.

Thank you, just at the right time.

At the moment this story has 2 upvotes in a half hour and is in the 8th position on the front page. Apparently HN has a fairy godmother algorithm that randomly promotes posts.

Great work HN team, since it’s indeed an interesting story.

I assume it was for 30 minutes in waiting with 0 votes before someone digged it out.

That is indeed how it works

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

But not in this case. It's a slow Sunday afternoon and getting a few upvotes quickly is enough

Interesting! I didn't know about the 'pool' section of HN.

Would you mind explaining to us how it works?

There was a good explanation when they published the mechanism

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309

Mods might be amused to be described as fairly godmothers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com