How the words we teach English language learners changed

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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).

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

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

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.

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

Why keen?

> 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.

Reader mode required.

Point your Duck at "VOA Special English"

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.

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

Thank you, just at the right time.

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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.