Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Basic English - 1500 "essential" words in audio format
My colleague Yvan Baptiste has added to his extensive selection of online exercises.
After meeting Jean-Paul Nerrière, the author of Don't speak English, Speak Globish, Yvan asked me to record the "1500 English words" that are essential to Nerrière's concept of "Global English" (basically a selection of words which, in the author's opinion, are sufficient to allow people around the world to communicate without the bother of learning the whole of the extensive English lexicon).
Whatever my views on the Globish concept [For one, I think it skirts the problem of communicating with the majority of English speakers, most of whom don't actually restrict themselves to 1500 particular words, native speakers or not], it was actually a great occasion to get a nice corpus of generally common English words into audio format for the use of teachers and students alike. Obviously the words are used out of context but there's nothing like practising stressed and unstressed syllables if you want to be understood by natives. I can't er...stress this enough (BOOM BOOM!)
So, you can get listening over at Yvan's Globish page and if it tickles your fancy you can have a look at my three two (see the comments on this post) recommended books on the subject of English basics: There's Les 1800 mots de base ("collège" level in France), Les 3500 mots essentiels ("lycée/BTS" level in France), both by Christian Bouscaren and Claude Rivière, two of the most eminent exponents of French-style English linguistics. There is also Don't Speak English: Parlez Globish by the aforementioned Jean-Paul Nerrière.
5 Comments:
I don't know, I just feel so uncomfortable with this Globish stuff. It hasn't got anything to do with Yvan's work, which I really find interesting and useful, but I (and of course I'm not the only one :) have been doing this kind of thing for years -- I mean, finding out what is the useful lexical basis of the language, drawing lists and working from there on and up.
Where is Nerrière's "concept" then? Why do you recommend his book along with Bouscaren's, do you find it as good? (this is not a tricky question, I haven't read Nerrière's book, only his website and that was waaayyy enough for me). Oh, and his site isn't even html valid (hee hee, too bad Mr ex-vice chairman of IBM :-) All right, that was mean. But fun!
Am I the only one who feels there's some kind of personal promotion here? Wow, I must really be paranoid. :-(
By
Fred, at 10/22/2004 11:45 PM
You're right there. I did put a link to Mr Nerrière's book. Well I would, wouldn't I? I have a partner account with Amazon that earns me a little commission on books bought through the links on my site (don't worry, I don't spend it on beer...I buy books with anything I make!) but it must have been late as I didn't word the sentence correctly.
I certainly don't rate Nerrière's book above Bousacaren's (it's not comparing like with like for a start) and I don't rate the "Globish" thing at all. Nerrière didn't invent the term anyway. So no, I don't recommend his book as a reference for basic English vocabulary and I have changed the wording in my post accordingly.
By
Darren, at 10/23/2004 3:12 PM
Well I am disappointed, I really thought the only reason you dealt with Amazon was that they supplied you with nice English beer...
Anyway, do you have any idea why I couldn't reach these comments with Firefox? Only IE could get me here :-(
Could it be because I inserted html in the text? That's the only difference I could find with other blocks of comment.
By
Fred, at 10/23/2004 7:48 PM
I am using Firefox to comment and it works fine. I dunno why you couldn't get here!
By
Darren, at 10/24/2004 12:02 AM
wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, well this takes the Engilish language to a complete new platform , where did you get the idea to do thissss? well I am impressed ,this is progress , well done JO P
By
JoP, at 2/04/2008 6:15 PM
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