Learning Another Language

Preliminary Remarks

• Still trying to get used to reading the printed Greek alphabet? Try this: every day without fail, open a book or magazine in Greek, pick out 20 words you don't know, and look them up in a dictionary. It'll do wonders in getting you used to picking out the iotas in words like σιμιγδάλι. Furthermore, after a couple weeks of pain, your knowledge of the order of the letters in the Greek alphabet will be rock solid.

• If you're learning Greek, you undoubtedly own some sort of teaching grammar, with readings and exercises. But you need a reference grammar too (see Links ) — there are too many times that you need to know the declension or conjugation of a specific word, or a clarification of some puzzling usage you run across, and only a reference grammar will help you then.

• If you did learn some language other than your mother tongue when you were young, then you will have acquired the necessary wrinkles in your brain to enable you to learn another language later in life. Even learning Latin (which I suppose doesn't happen any more) seems to do the trick; even better is being expected, as a child, to orally understand relatives or neighbours babbling at you in French / Spanish / German...  The people I've met who didn't have that childhood experience generally seem to find it very hard to make sense of a second language by the time they reach the ripe old age of twenty-five. The same thing seems to apply to playing a musical instrument. A news item on page 27 of the June 2006 Scientific American indicates that a child's cerebral cortex grows rapidly (physically) from age 7 to 11, and then thins down in the late teens, "which could reflect withering of unused neural connections as the brain streamlines its operations."

• Oddly, you can learn to read a language without being able to write it, speak it, or understand it orally. At the time I learned French, I was suddenly submerged in the language and learned to read, write, understand, and speak it simultaneously — so it seemed that this is the way it must be. But later when I dabbled in other (mostly Romance) languages, I found I could learn to read them without developing any writing, speaking, or oral comprehension skills. (There is one qualification to that: I do need to be able to pronounce the language in a reasonable fashion, or I can't succeed in remembering any vocabulary.) Despite my current interest in learning to understand written Greek, I have neither the opportunity nor the free time to learn the spoken language; so the material on this site will deal only with certain aspects of learning to read (modern) Greek.

Language Learning: Vocabulary

• If you look at North American language-learning textbooks, the benchmark for vocabulary appears to be about 1,200 words to be learned over a period of 2 years. But for a vocabulary-rich language like English, Italian, German, or Greek, you probably have to know tens of thousands of words to be able to hit only a maximum of one word you can't define in reading a 1,000-word magazine page. In the light of this, what good is the language training given in our schools?

• Of course, you should argue with that "tens of thousands" claim. I read French. I know of no good French word-frequency list that would enable me to estimate my passive vocabulary in that language, but I doubt that it exceeds 8,000 words. This does not stop me from reading French magazines and newspapers, since I do know a lot of words, and the context will help me to guess many of the words I don't know. A native English speaker might very well not know the exact meaning of the word "turpitude" or the precise definition of "mazurka" or "enzyme", but it wouldn't bother her. And she might not be able to define "forecastle", "battlement", or "macrophage" exactly, but the context would often tell her enough to make a fuzzy but sufficient guess at the meaning of the word in question. But there is still a threshold. For sure I know a good 1,000 words in German; but can I read a German newspaper? Lotsa luck. So I'm still dubious about standard language courses that do grammar to death (for two years!) but teach only a measly 1,200-word vocabulary.

• This would seem to be a more reasonable approach to learning a language:

  • first, learn the grammar as fast as possible;

  • then build a large working vocabulary, with the practical goal of being able to read a news magazine published in the language.

• How do you go about learning vocabulary? For starters, pick up a thousand words by working your way through a basic textbook. At that point, you will find, when reading, that there is nothing more frustrating than looking up a word in a dictionary and finding out it means "whoever" or "until"; so learning such "function words" has to come next. After that comes a general vocabulary buildup (...and you will find verbs the hardest thing to remember). More concretely:

  1. Work your way through a textbook on the language as fast as you can. You need to learn enough grammar to recognize things. Your grammar will improve later as you read things, anyway.

  2. Learn all the function words by brute force (pronouns, pronominal adjectives & adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions). You can find these summarized in a reference grammar (see Links ).

  3. Subscribe to a news magazine or newspaper in the language and read it at breakfast.

  4. Learn the top 3,000 words in the language over and above the function words, or at least learn 3,000 very common words.

  5. Study a book listing thousands of words in the language by theme (if such a book exists). If you can find a course, online or off, that enables you to accomplish this, so much the better.

Word-frequency Lists

• A so-called word-frequency list for a given language is created by first compiling a multi-million-word "corpus" of real-world sentences in the language (drawn largely from newspapers and magazines), then counting how many times each word occurs in the corpus, and then constructing a list of all the individual words (from the most frequent to the least frequent), with each word tagged with the number of occurrences of the word. For Greek, such a list might start off like this:

ο	5733398
εγώ	5244440
μου	1878515
···	···

• Such a word-frequency list turns out to be very hard to compile if it is done properly, because ideally it should consist of words in their dictionary form: you would rather not have separate entries for the words "sink", "sinks", "sinking", "sank", "sunk" in an English-language word-frequency list. Furthermore, "sink" can be either a verb or a noun, so there should be separate entries for "sink [V]" and "sink [N]".

• I don't have access to a (good) word-frequency list for English or for Greek, but the Centro de Linguistica of the Universidade de Lisboa has a good one for Portuguese (see Links ). The figures for Greek are obviously going to differ from those for Portuguese, but the overall distribution is probably qualitatively similar. For Portuguese:

	% of Words Met That Will Fall in This Thousand	Running Total %
1st thousand words	76.3%	76%
2nd thousand words	6.8%	83%
3rd thousand words	3.5%	87%
4th thousand words	2.2%	89%
5th thousand words	1.5%	90%
···	···	···
15th thousand words	0.2%	95%

• What this table says is this: if you know the top thousand words, you know a whopping 3 out 4 (i.e., 76%) of the words you will meet in a typical text. But learning the 2nd thousand gives you only an additional 7% (well, 6.8%) of words encountered, bringing you up to a total of 83% of the words you will meet.

• Three conclusions can be drawn from the Portuguese word-frequency list:

  • If you know the 3,000 most common words, you know 87% of the words you are likely to hit. That's 7 out of 8: sounds good, eh? Well, it's not. A magazine page is 1,000 words, and you wouldn't know 1 out of 8, which is 125 words. Not many of these will be duplicates (see the next point below: words in the upper thousands are all rarely occurring words). About a hundred dictionary lookups just to read one magazine page? Talk about pain.

  • So you want to learn more than 3,000 words? What do you learn next? The 4th thousand? The 5th? Well, learning the 4th thousand gives you an additional 2.2%, and the 5th thousand another 1.5%. So it's not even humongously important which thousand you might choose to learn next amongst, say, the 4th through the 8th thousand.

  • Worse than that, if you learned 15,000 words, you would still know only 95% of the words you encounter!!! That leaves you with 50 unknown words on a 1,000-word magazine page. You know, that's a real problem, even if it is somewhat mitigated by the guessing-from-context ploy mentioned above (in the "Language Learning: Vocabulary" section).

Well Then, So What?

• What are the usual proposed solutions to this vocabulary problem? There are two. The 1st way: go live in a country where the language is spoken. This does work (as long as you had the requisite cerebral development as a child). The 2nd way: buy, and study, a book giving 10,000 words in the language arranged by theme (The Human Body, Land Animals, Sports, etc.). The logic behind this is that any (coherent) material you read will usually focus on a somewhat limited subject, so knowing most of the words for a wide variety of topics will help to decrease the unknown-word count for any specific article. Within limits, this works. But first of all you have to belong to the 3% of the population that's nerdy enough to work your way through a vocabulary-by-theme book. And secondly, unglued words don't stick, so you have to glue them to your brain by subscribing to a news magazine or newspaper written in the language, from which you select one article to read every day.

• Gradually, I will add various batches of Greek vocabulary to this site (see AboutThis Site ). But I do not intend to compile vocabulary lists by theme — before I were able to finish such a large enterprise, I would have gone on to be subjected to my eternal reward, and some publisher would have finally gotten around to putting out a book like this for Greek anyway. Hey there, Random House: how about producing 6,000 Essential Greek Words — I'll buy it!