One of my random theories on language learning concerns the Swadesh List, "one of several lists of vocabulary with "basic" meanings and developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1940-50s, which is used in lexicostatistics (quantitative language relatedness assessment) and glottochronology (language divergence dating)."
If this sounds like gobbledygook, that's OK. It kind of is, really. Basically, linguists use this list of words called the Swadesh List to study how closely related (or not) certain languages are to one another. They are able to "determine the approximate date of first separation of genetically related language(s)" and other such nifty things.
In regards to language learning, my theory (currently in a very early stage of extrapolation) is that people can learn all the words on the Swadesh List at an early stage of foreign language study to provide them with a very basic, low-level and frequently-used lexicon. This vocabulary will allow learners to express a large amount of thoughts and ideas using few words. This could be used hand-in-hand with action-oriented language learning, another underdeveloped language learning theory of mine which maintains that verbs are what "make things happen" in any language, and that with a small handful of core verbs, many things can be related in a given language.
Some of the verbs on the Swadesh List are high-frequency verbs, such as drink, eat, breathe, laugh, see, hear, know, think, smell, sleep, live, die, kill, fight, hit, cut, split, scratch, dig, swim, fly, walk, come, lie, sit, stand, turn, fall, give, hold, squeeze, rub, wash, wipe, pull, push, throw, tie, count, say, sing and play. With these verbs alone under your belt, there are a lot of useful actions that can be expressed.
For more information on the Swadesh List, check out Wiktionary's Swadesh List entry where you'll find the list in multiple languages on a nice chart.
More to come on action-oriented language learning and other such emerging theories of how to get the most out of time spent learning a foreign language.
