Commonly used verbs are less likely to change

A verb that is used often will change verb slowly, whilst a verb that is used less frequently will change less. This is according to a Harvard University team lead by Martin Nowak. Nowak is not a linguist but rather a professor of mathematics and of biology at Harvard He studies evolutionary dynamics. He applied evolutionary mathematical models to words. His Harvard team looked at 177 Old English irregular verbs and traced their develop to today.

Nowak found that verbs that are irregular change to regular verbs with “ed” endings 10 times faster than irregular verbs that are used more often. This is linguistic evolution and mathematics. If you think about it it makes sense. However, what is interesting is Nowak studied this phenomenom with empirical data.
These ancient irregular verbs that do not change are fossils or rather they represent long abandon rules of how verbs were conjugated in the past.

Modern verbs

All modern verbs are regular. The English language is becoming more simple and clear. For example “to google” is a classic example. You say ‘I googled something last night’.

Historical context of the written word

Many people focus on the written word in school when trying to learn a language. Their homework is written, they have reading assignments etc. But think about it, until a hundred years ago less than ten percent of population of most counties read or wrote as a form of communication. It was actually like less than one perfect, and that was only a limited form of communication. Think about it most of your communication is the spoken word. A better home work assignment would watch the news and in a recorder explain your target language what it was about, rather, than reading and written homework.

What I learn in an African market about language learning

When I was in Africa I met many people in the markets using three or four languages with ease. Do you think they learned it for a book or in school? They could have been a market full of geniuses, but I think it was they listened and spoke. They learned it by speaking to people, not out of a book. I think most of them would not know how to write in maybe but one of these languages. But what does it matter, they can speak many languages. And to speak and understand a language is most people’s modest objective.

People who can not understand when people speak a foreign language

When learning a language you should always focus on understanding and speaking. Use the written word only as an aid to speaking. For example, if seeing the written word I your target foreign language will help you remember better. Or if you do not have any audio resources and want to read to learn, but make sure your pronunciation is good. Once you speak a language you can improve through reading, but many people I know can kind of read a language but can not understand native speakers when they speak. This is a separate and more complex skill compared to reading and writing a language. Language is auditory. Learn to understand and speak as your first focus and reading and writing as a secondary focus. So focus on understanding, then speaking, then reading, then writing. If you can understand the rest is easy as you can listen to the radio all day and will eventually be able to repeat the patterns, just like you learned English.

Languages are part of the human database of knowledge and tell us about or cultures and thinking processes. With the extinction of a language, a part of collective human knowledge is lost forever. It is on par with a museum full of ancient treasures being destroyed. National Geographic is studying this problem.

“Languages are undergoing a global extinction crisis that greatly exceeds the pace of species extinction,” linguistics professor David Harrison told the National Geographic website .
Harrison said half of the world’s 7,000 languages were expected to disappear before the end of the century.
He said indigenous people had an intimate knowledge of their environment that was lost when their language disappeared, along with concepts dealing with mathematics and the nature of time often unfamiliar to western thinking.
“Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it’s only in people’s heads,” he said. “We are seeing in front of our eyes the erosion of the human knowledge base.”.

There are many places to read about language extinction.  I have thought about creating programs myself to help preserve languages that might be extinct.

How long to learn a language

The following is based on my estimates of how long it takes an adult who is learning by self study to bring themselves to a conversational level

How long does it take to learn a language

First how long does it take you to learn words and phrases to speak you language conversationally.  It takes about 3500 words to speak at a reasonable level.  So the question is, how long does it take, to learn these words in your target language. Assuming ceteris Paribas, you can learn a day 10 – About 2 hours.  That means about 700 hours of study.

How long does it take to learn the grammar of a language

Most languages have about 50 main grammar ideas. It takes about 2 hours therefore, it brings our total to 800, however, adding general pronunciation and getting use to the language it’s another 200 hours.

So the grand total is about 1000 hours of study to get speaking a language reasonably well.  But of course if you go crazy studying you can start in a week, but at a basic level.

How babies learn languages I think how babies learn language is common sense. Many times linguists have crazy theories about how babies learn language. But the bottom line is babies systematically sort though sounds and categorizes them to create a structure which they can subsequently hang further linguistic information. It is not, in my opinion, any innate knowledge, rather it is learned.
“A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does helps to shed new light on how people learn to talk, researchers said on Tuesday. They said the finding casts doubt on theories that babies are born knowing all the possible sounds in all of the world’s languages. “The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems,” said James McClelland, a psychology professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California” Read the full article on

How a babies learn a language.

If you want to learn a language fast I will have a computer program to learn a language.

Although I have not give this much though, I would say my first reaction is, with all due respect, its a nice theory but has limited practical application and further not fully true. I can generally make sentences and create sentence in Polish that are grammatically correct. However, if I have not herd a sequence, even in a limited way it would be very hard to be perfectly correct.  Further, when I give Polish native speakers crazy fun tests on their own grammar, they do not know it.  I will take foreign or fictional or elf language words or strange ideas and ask them to make a sentence with all the proper word endings etc, and they have to think about and debate the declinations and grammar, as they have never herd such word declinations. Even if there is a rule they do not have an innate feel for it, they have to start thinking. Many times they will get it wrong according to the rule and say, ‘oh well we do not usually change foreign’ words or phrases. This is true, but the point is its hard for them to self generate which they have not herd or encountered.  Maybe I am missing the point with generative grammar linguistic theory, but in reality it never sat well with me. I think you need massive exposure to a language to speak it.

Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar by Robin H. Ray MIT-Controversies in the field of linguistics seldom make headlines, which is why the current imbroglio over an alleged counterexample to Universal Grammar (UG), made famous in the 1960s by Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics, is so unusual.

On one side is Daniel L. Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, who has spent several decades studying Pirahã, a language spoken by roughly 350 indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. On the other are a number of linguists, including MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, who have thrown doubt upon many of Everett’s claims, both cultural and linguistic, about the Pirahã

The question here is do languages all have a common structure, and what does this tell us about out brain.

Learn a language fast