Green Eggs and Ham
In everyday life, most of us use a very limited number of words to express ourselves.
You may have read Dr Seuss‘ The Cat in the Hat as a child. The book contains only 225 words. Afterwards, the good doctor decided that he’d been too verbose and restricted himself to a book using only 50 words. Forty-nine of them contained only one syllable.
We usually need to talk about rather more than cats and hats and Green Eggs and Ham – the title of the 50-word opus – but Dr Seuss teaches us that a knowledge of a few words can go a long way.
To converse on general topics, it has been estimated that we only need 1,000 words. Or, put another way, if we learned six words a day, we could have the vocabulary we need to speak in six months. That’s encouraging, isn’t it?
There is, predictably, a caveat. They have to be the right words. Language-learning apps have their uses, but the big problem with most of them is that they make us use words that we will probably hardly ever need. When was the last time you used the word ‘owl’? Yes, Duolingo, we are looking at you! In chapter 2 we will show you how to choose the words you need. Six a day, for six months. And by selecting the languages you learn with care, you could learn to express yourself in a number of languages at once.
