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.

I have blogged a bit about my theory of action-oriented language learning regarding my Russian studies. I just came across a list of the top 20 most-used verbs in German and wanted to share it here for anyone interested in taking a similar approach to learning German.

Verbs make things happen! Learn the basic verbs in any language and you can start to make things happen, too!

I am finally about to start learning Russian right now (well, after I finish this post). I am going to take an action-oriented approach to learning Russian, meaning that I'll be learning the most important verbs first in an effort to be able to express actions when I speak.

My theory on this is that verbs are what make things happen. So if I want to make things happen in Russian, I need to know the core verbs! These include such verbs as be, go, want, like, give, have, make, do, come, need... key verbs that you say hundreds of times on an average day (depending, of course, on how much you chatter).

At any rate, I will develop that theory in other parts of this site. For now, the explanation above should suffice. But before I begin learning the verbs, I want to learn the Cyrillic alphabet! If I weren't interested in learning to read and write in Russian, I would skip this altogether. But I don't just want to be able to speak Russian, I want to enjoy its written aspects as well.

Some of the best resources I have found in my searches on the Cyrillic alphabet are:

Omniglot.com Info on Russian Alphabet
MasterRussian.com on the Cyrillic Alphabet
Free Language Resources for Learning Cyrillic Alphabet
Swarthmore Page on Russian Alphabet
Learning the Russian Alphabet in Two Hours (Sounds cool! Hope it works.)
An Introduction to Russian Alphabet
Geocities Page on Cyrillic Alphabetl

So before I get into the action, I am going to work on the first step in the lifelong process of learning a foreign language with a foreign alphabet! More to come soon...