Cainntear wrote:SGP wrote:Cavesa wrote:I still can't see what is the connection with language hacking, perhaps I am just too tired. And to get just the most common ones, you can google them by cefr level or look in any beginner/intermediate grammar book.
If you wanted to do so, you could decide to re-read both of my first post and my reply to your previous post afterwards. Sometimes things really become more clear after one already has slept.
It wouldn't make much of a difference, because in neither of those posts do you ever define what you mean by "language hacking".
It is true that I didn't define it there in the way of "language hacking means ... to me". But I did define this thread's query, leading to the same result.
To me, "language hacking" is a trademark owned by a person I really don't like much, whose advice to language learners is vague, empty and useless, and a series of language learning books by said person which are full of errors and plain old bad teaching.
And as for me, while not knowing his books, I have a "middle course" point of view related to his way of teaching. There is at least one thing I nevertheless learned from him (not by meeting him in person of course). And this is that sometimes the use of Tarzan speech, like using the infinitive forms of verbs, is a workaround that can help. (Not doing it for the likes of French, but if I needed to speak some of my beginner level languages, I possibly would do it that way when needed).
Other than that... I used the term "language hacking" because this thread is about a certain type of shortcut, explained in the first post.
I know the term evolved out of the idea of "life hacks", which sometimes are sometimes useful, sometimes silly, and sometimes just how the damn thing was designed to work in the first place. For example, I once saw a "life hack" video that promised to teach me a way to tie my shoelaces so they would never fall off. The guy literally proceeded to tell me what my mother and my primary 1 teacher taught me when I was a child, and he genuinely believed he was telling me something new.
Now that is plainly weird... it also happened to me that I read about some of the (So-Called) Genuinely Super Mega Nifty Life Hacks... only to discover that it was fully 101 (= basic). Reminds me of ... you know what? That entirely nonsensical How To Tear A Piece Of Paper tutorial...
What you're talking about isn't something new or special, it's what literally thousands of teachers and millions of learners have been doing for a long, long time.
Yes it isn't something new.
The only thing that makes it different is that you are asking for what comes quickest to us as individual learners, but I don't think that's a particularly helpful approach. What makes us in particular especially useful? Does it matter whether we use them appropriately? (Certainly, if there's anything we overuse, that's going to jump to mind first.)
Well, the query wasn't about asking others for usage examples, but only for those words. Other than that, the query is meant to be something like a collective brainstorming.
If you want to know which words come to mind quickest for a large number of people, the place to start is a frequency list. There is a direct relationship between the frequency of use of a word and the speed of recall -- the more we use or are exposed to a word, the better we know it and the easier and quicker it becomes to recall; the better we know a word and the easier and quicker it is to recall, the more likely we are to use it. That's self-sustaining.
As for frequency lists, well I do know about their existence (as I said either in this or the Spanish thread)... but what I am striving for still is something that is even more real-world-ish. Because at least some of them are based on subtitles, others on certain web content, and so on. This differs from the purpose I intended by opening this thread.
SGP wrote:As for me, I doubt that those two methods would yield the very same results:
- Citing a full list of those words from a grammar textbook, for example
- Asking the French learners about those of those words that they can remember very easily and without additional thinking
No, because a good textbook would yield better results than asking random French learners what they've learned, because the book would be written by someone who has dedicated a not-inconsiderable amount of time to finding out what is most immediately useful.
I do confirm that those textbooks usually are written by someone more experienced.
At the same time, those I looked at (and they weren't just one or two) are too academical for the purposes of, for example, myself, even those that are written to be a practical course for daily life conversations. This is about the traditional medieval time (literally) approach of learning grammar, many/most publishing houses still stick to it, using some minor modifications at most... And it is also about something else, including, but not limited too, teaching a multitude of words simply because "everybody teaches them". As for me, I am more of a subset loving person.
