… to fluency.

There is this idea that if you learn 10,000 sentences (or so) you will more or less become fluent in a language.  There are wiki pages etc. written about this – perhaps in too much detail as the idea is straightforward.

And as ideas go, it is a pretty good one. I don’t know how good you would be knowing 10,000 sentences in whatever language, but it is certainly going to help.

So, I want to add sentences (with audio) to Surface Languages along with a kindof  SRS system. I’ve written the code. I’ve tested the pages. I have a database. I’ve done the technical stuff.

And now I come to the most difficult part of the process which is deciding on the sentences to include. (I’ve wittered on about the decision making process elsewhere, but it is not straight-forward – at least for me). Basically, I don’t think the content of the sentences matters as long as:

1. They do not include slang. (It is too specific to groups/age ranges).

2. They are useful. I don’t want to include ‘the elephant is in the bath’. ‘I am in the bath’ would be a more useful variant – and no I’m not  referring to myself.

3. I couldn’t think of a third proviso – which may be where I’m going wrong.

I don’t have unlimited money or time and so am going at least initially to limit each language I do to somewhere between 500 and 1000 sentences along with audio.

I’m almost ready to get the first translations done. These will be Polish and Italian. I’ll also need audio in these languages and in English (so that say an Italian can learn the English phrases).

Have fun kids.

Pax,

MoOnFaCe.