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E.V.Gunnemark’s
Mini
System:
Language-Learning
for Beginners
The ‘Mini’ system for each foreign language one wants to
learn consists of three parts:
MINIPHRASE: This consists of about
150 ‘numbers’, with almost 300 everyday phrases or expressions.
MINILEX: A list of about 500 words
with their equivalents in the foreign language, including things like numbers,
days of the week etc.
MINIGRAM: A basic grammar of the
foreign language. Its content and size will vary according to the language
concerned. The grammars for German or Italian, for example, would perhaps be
about 10 pages each, while that for English could probably be considerably
shorter. Because each Minigram will have to be, as it were, tailor-made, very
few have been made up to now. Each one will require a lot of work.
FIRST one should learn 100 or more of the ‘miniphrases’.
Learn them by heart! Then one can start on the Minilex. Learn the words there
by heart too. The aim is to be able to use the phrases and words immediately,
without hesitation, at any time the need arises. Erik Gunnemark points out how
the mastery of a core of common phrases is invaluable for one’s
self-confidence. One can then at least say something
in everyday situations.
When one travels to a country where the foreign language
concerned is spoken, one should take the Miniphrase and Minilex lists, plus a
little dictionary.
Already by 1942 Erik V. Gunnemark, of
But already in the 1960’s he had had one of his most
important insights. As he has written in The
Art and Science of Learning Languages (by A. Gethin and E.V. Gunnemark,
Intellect, 1996, pp.76, 81):
“Don’t bother about marginal ‘interest’
words in the beginning
Most ‘interest’ words – words belonging to particular
‘fields of interest’ or to subject areas of various kinds – are not central to
vocabulary learning; they are marginal. You should not learn these marginal
interest words at the expense of central words. If you do, you are only
acquiring seeming knowledge … unimportant words instead of the ones you really
ought to be learning. …
One seldom needs to remember without delay the words for
animals, plants, parts of the body and illnesses, any more than the names of
pieces of furniture or household utensils. As a result of the spread of
department stores and supermarkets, words that were previously common in speech
are now used comparatively rarely in everyday life. This applies, among other
things, to many of the names in different languages of items of food, clothes,
writing materials and various odds and ends.
In the teaching of beginners in
some countries a lot of time is wasted on marginal words. Many students are
still deceived into thinking that it is important to know the equivalents of
words like monkey, donkey…snail,
parrot…plum, pear…horseshoe…church bell…There is nothing wrong in itself
with knowing a lot of marginal ‘interest’ words. But there is usually plenty of
time to look them up in a pocket dictionary, and in principle you should learn
them at a later stage, after the central words.
…………. Exercises in asking the way, shopping and ordering
in restaurants are for the most part wasted time and effort. The words learned
are mainly marginal ‘interest’ words. Both at the beginner’s stage and later
there are a whole lot of other things which are much more important to practise
and fix in the memory.”
There are unfortunately many examples of such misdirected
energies in the teaching of languages to beginners: for instance, a Swedish
school-book for English where the pupils are prompted to learn words associated
with the bathroom like flannel,
nailbrush, bidet, scales, cistern, safety razor, bath mat, tile, towel rack, bar
of soap, or Italian coursebooks for use at the elementary stage of English
in which the children are given lists to learn of the names of the creatures to
be found at the seaside.
Erik Gunnemark could translate from 45 languages, and was the
author, with Donald Kenrick, of the Geolinguistic Handbook.
See www.lingua.org.uk/l-learn.html , www.lingua.org.uk/minilex.html
, www.lingua.org.uk/miniphr.html , www.lingua.org.uk/miniphr.it.html
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