Hi, > > Why not just teach them Basic (sometime called Basic English)? 850 > English words that you can do 90% of your needed communication with > and be understood by any English speaker. Learn the whole damn thing > in a week. Been around since the 30's. Too damn simple, I guess. Back > in the 50's it was the lingua franca of science fiction fame.
The Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner's English Dictionary gives information on the frequency of use of words. It divides them into 3 frequency bands, and includes an appendix of the 650 in the 'most frequent' band. I'm not sure what percentage of discourses this might cover, but it's certainly advertised as a quick and efficient way for foreign students to build their vocabulary. I'm not sure how Ogden derived his list of words (wishful thinking, I suspect), but not surprisingly it differs from Cobuild. The Cobuild list is derived from the so-called Bank of English, which is a large concordance of actual current use. No doubt it's more accurate for the present day than Ogden's list. Ogden: a able about account acid across act addition adjustment... Cobuild: a able about accept accord according to account across... A problem with Ogden's approach is that he expects people, including native speakers, to learn an artificial language. These sort of attempts are doomed to fail because there's no reason why a native speaker should adopt the artificial language, and foreign learners want to speak the same language as the natives, so they have no incentive to learn something like Basic English. Another problem is that the word list would need to be changed frequently to reflect current use, or would have to be frozen, further increasing the artificiality. That's not to say that controlled languages, such as airline English, are not useful, valuable and well worth the effort. http://www.diac.com/~entente/basicpg.html#wurdz http://www.simplifiedenglish-aecma.org/Simplified_English.htm http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/attempto/description/index.html -- Cheers, Bob
