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How the words we teach English language learners changed
- delichon 2mo agoAt 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.
- mdrachuk 2mo agoGreat work HN team, since it’s indeed an interesting story.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- kuboble 2mo agoI assume it was for 30 minutes in waiting with 0 votes before someone digged it out.
- calpaterson 2mo agoThat is indeed how it works https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool But not in this case. It's a slow Sunday afternoon and getting a few upvotes quickly is enough
- joshdavham 2mo agoInteresting! I didn't know about the 'pool' section of HN. Would you mind explaining to us how it works?
- calpaterson 2mo agoThere was a good explanation when they published the mechanism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309
- mr_toad 2mo agoMods might be amused to be described as fairly godmothers.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- KinetiNode 2mo ago[dead]
- kuboble 2mo agoI 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).
- YoshiRulz 2mo agoAnother commenter mentioned that enWiktionary[1] has some, and I also found a dewp article[2]. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Ge... [2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequenzwörterbuch https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequenzwörterbuch
- Frieren 2mo ago> 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.
- kuboble 2mo agoI would blame it more on globalization. In 1953 people were not exposed as much to different groups of people far away.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoI can't quite follow your point. Are you saying there is more inequality today than in 1953?
- Frieren 2mo agoFrom 1945 to 1980 inequality was the lowest in the USA. From 1980 onward economic inequality exploded. I understand that you cannot follow my point without this important piece of information.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoSo you're talking strictly about economic inequality. Because in 1953 we were still 10 years away from the end of legal segregation.
- watwut 2mo agoBy the eay things are going, we may be 10 or less years away from legal resegration. The administration is actively working on that.
- bethekidyouwant 2mo agoWhy keen?
- OJFord 2mo agoInteresting one if you look at Google Ngram Viewer – usage dropped off massively to 70s/80s, and it's picked back up since but not to 1953 or earlier levels, so even that doesn't explain it. Must just be the combination of that increase as well as other words decreasing in usage I suppose. E.g. perhaps we're a bit less keen, but also much less passionate, so keen ends up making the cut.
- ghaff 2mo agoAs a native English speaker, keen feels like a very 1950s TV word. Don't know if that's actually true but feels like that way. I expect you're more likely to hear like cool today are some more contemporary word.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoBrits still use the word somewhat frequently, though I haven’t bumped into many of them in the last ten years.
- ghaff 2mo agoYeah, I guess I can also see it as more of a Britishism (etc.) currently.
- saltcured 2mo agoRight, as far as live exposure, I associate its usage with UK/AU/NZ expats in my western US, academic R&D microcosm.
- ifwinterco 2mo agoKeen is definitely a word but when used to describe a person it’s often a bit of a backhanded compliment… you don’t really want to be keen. Saying "I'm keen to do x" or "he's keen to do y" is a fairly common normal usage but having said that, wouldn't normally be my first choice of language as a millennial, maybe does sound a bit old fashioned
- morninglight 2mo agoPoint your Duck at "VOA Special English"
- anymouse123456 2mo agoUseless, obnoxious, absolutely frustrating Scrolljacker? Straight to jail.
- twosdai 2mo agoI thought the same thing.
- crazygringo 2mo agoI 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.
- thaumasiotes 2mo ago> 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. Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item. Otherwise your point is correct; all semantic words are equally difficult and which ones you know depends on the things you like to talk about. Grammatical words are more difficult, and more important, but this is so widely understood that language-learning material already treats them as an entirely separate class of things to learn. > 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. (1) You seem to want COCA, which includes a bunch of transcribed telephone calls. (2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.
- calvinmorrison 2mo agoMy mum learned watching cowboy TV in the 60s and 70s. She's got some uh colloquialisms for sure
- DenisDolya 2mo agoThank you, just at the right time.
- wseqyrku 2mo agoIt's changed so much I can't even parse the title.
- shh_labs 2mo agoEvidently grammar's become slacker
- penguin_booze 2mo agoWe have america to thank for that.
- vanderZwan 2mo agoThe 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.
- thomastjeffery 2mo ago> 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.
- pixl97 2mo agoEh, this seems somewhat right, but somewhat not right either. Language has to do with our Monkeysphere, that humans over long periods of time in the past were limited to a very small subset of people they interacted with socially and closely. A few institutions likely had a large effect on your language like the church depending on where you were. After that it was the people you interacted with to stay alive. Because almost everything was in person or person to person transfer of information a lot of socially encoded clues were involved which lessened the need for well defined words. Books were the first stage of homogenizing language as they could be shared over long distances and to many people, but more sequentially than latter forms of communication. After that radio and TV had a huge effect, for example the 'General American' used in broadcasts that was based heavily on a midwestern accent. As we encroached on the 70s and 80s the previous technological advances and things like high speed interstates and trucking shrank America to something you could drive across in less than a week, and you could reach anywhere by voice nearly instantly. Suddenly people in California, Texas and New York all could be in the same meetings and local colloquialisms would need explained, so people would trend to a shared vocabulary. It's also odd to me to say an LLM isn't subjective. Each LLM has it's own behavior, it's that there are like 20 or 30 big LLMs in all, and people are using them millions to billions of time so we're getting that one LLMs language everywhere. And that's why I disagree and will say natural language is computable, but it's also lossy and probabilistic. And for the most part it's single prompt and being ran by the user for the cheapest price possible.
- ksec 2mo agoI mean the subject is interesting but I have the say the design of the page is not only janky and needlessly complicated with animations.
- Jtarii 2mo agoalways hated this style of web presentation.
- dredmorbius 2mo agoTrying 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.
- bluGill 2mo agoI thought it was one of those paywalls that give you a taste. Since it wasn't enough for me to pay I was going for close when more came up. Only then did I realize what was going on. It was still annoying enough give up after a few more pages.
- WalterBright 2mo agoA new fad I've seen more and more lately is removing the scroll bars. Arrgh.
- dredmorbius 2mo agoNot only have they killed the scrollbar, but they've attempted to kill my scrollbar-killing rant: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511>. That seems not to be available at either the Internet Archive nor Archive Today: <https://web.archive.org/web/20200000000000*/https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq https://web.archive.org/web/20200000000000*/https://ello.co/...> <https://archive.is/https%3A%2F%2Fello.co%2Fdredmorbius%2Fpost%2F0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq https://archive.is/https%3A%2F%2Fello.co%2Fdredmorbius%2Fpos...> Sic transit gloria data. Update: At least some of the Wayback captures have the actual page content if you view source. See for example: <https://web.archive.org/web/20210524202824/https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq https://web.archive.org/web/20210524202824/https://ello.co/d...>. (Another reason I'm pretty salty about breaking basic HTML page functionality for slick trix.)
- WalterBright 2mo agoMy Mac mini has that wretched problem with every window.
- theproblemisyou 2mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ninjahawk1 2mo agoWhen 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.
- WalterBright 2mo agoHuh, English has changed perceptibly over just my lifetime.
- PsylentKnight 2mo agoAnd animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me
- WalterBright 2mo agoMost people can't accept reality.
- mmooss 2mo ago> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible. > Jesus Freaks That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.
- Xorakios 2mo ago
- azangru 2mo agoAll that time spent programming those visuals. Which, I think, ironically, have made the article harder to read, not easier.
- kimos 2mo agoBut you’re more likely to remember it. It’s not trying to be easier.
- calmworm 2mo agoReader mode required.
- joshdavham 2mo agoIt'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!
- rushil_b_patel 2mo agoMan this pudding is a cool publication : ) Thanks for this.
- vermarish 2mo agoEvery time I come across a pudding article, it stops me in my tracks. They're always so rewarding!
- legastenigga 2mo ago[dead]
- ggm 2mo agoI love that English is the lingua franca and that the phrase "lingua franca" is well understood in English, enough to be legitemately "an english word" (so to speak). The whole "we have a word for that" carries the seeds of it's own destruction. English does too: it's the same word.
- zarzavat 2mo ago> But also: apple didn’t make the new list. Neither did fork, soap, umbrella or leaf, for example. It’s not that these things vanished from everyday life, but many hands-on words became less central to the core vocabulary. I do not understand what this article is about. Clearly anyone learning English needs to know the word "fork". The article is essentially saying that the new list is more advanced than the old list. Okay? That's not interesting.
- alex_akimov 2mo agoI still cannot get my head around what is "lunch", "supper", and "dinner" - and how this was explained to me at school was different from reality, also depending on the country where you are in :-) No English school teaches you this, only real practice.
- ccppurcell 2mo agoDinner originally had a meaning like "biggest meal of the day". That used to be midday, culturally shifted to the evening. In some places and some contexts the language followed but not in every case. In southern England dinner is typically in the evening but we still say "school dinners" for subsidised lunches and "dinner ladies" for the women who serve them. Supper has always meant evening as far as I know but referring to the evening meal as supper became a marker first of the upper class and then of pretension. Hearing someone say supper is quite jarring for me.
- onraglanroad 2mo agoI'm not sure the folks down the chippy ordering a "fish supper" were trying to be pretentious!
- wyclif 2mo agoWhen I was growing up, "Supper's ready" was a common phrase. I think it is more common in the Anglosphere. Of course, my family is of English extraction so that might be why.
- cryptopian 2mo agoWait til you find out that in Northern England, we call the evening meal "tea", not to be confused with "tea", the delicious leaf water.