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.

Since I set out to learn the Cyrillic clphabet as a starting point in learning Russian, I have made good progress. I can now recognize almost all of the letters in Russian and know their approximate phonetic pronunciation. That is if I see the Cyrillic letter. I still need to be able to hear the sound and write the appropriate Cyrillic letter - that is the next step.

But before I move on, I wanted to clarify a distinction that I have come across while learning the Russian Alphabet: the different between the Russian alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet.

Wikipedia explains the Russian alphabet as such:

"The modern Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet. It was introduced into Kievan Rus' at the time of its conversion to Christianity (988), or, if certain archeological finds are correctly dated, at a slightly earlier date.

Wikipedia explains the Cyrillic alphabet as such:

"The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced /sɪˈrɪlɪk/ also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by a wide variety of Slavic languages—Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. It has also been used for other languages in the past. Not all letters in the Cyrillic alphabet are used in every language with which it is written.

Thus, "the Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet", which "is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by a wide variety of Slavic languages... as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe".

And while I'm going strong here, what is an alphabet anyway?

Once again, according to the omniscient Wikipedia, an alphabet is...

... a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. There are other systems of writing such as logosyllabic writing, in which each symbol represents a morpheme, or word or syllable or places the word within a category, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable.

The etymology of the word "alphabet" itself comes to Middle English from the Late Latin Alphabetum which in turn originates from the Ancient Greek Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.[1] There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are 'linear', which means that they are made up of lines. Notable exceptions are Braille, manual alphabets, and Morse code.

Omniglot.com also has excellent info about alphabets.

For those out there who have not studied Linguistics, it is important when reading the above-referenced pages to know the difference between a Phonetics and Phonology.

To come full circle, I thought I needed to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, but actually I needed to learn the variant thereof known as the Russian alphabet!