In order to understand a message, we need to first understand its parts and how they relate.
because Early language lessons should focus on chunks it’s like learning openings in chess when it comes to conversations. You memorize a whole sequence at a time.
Once we’re out of the opening, the game progresses into near-infinite complexity. We can’t learn each move, rather we need a broader understanding of messages to continue the conversation.
We should point our focus onto the parts that make up the messages, words.
It is only when we have near-complete understanding of all the parts in a message can we have hope for comprehending the message holistically. (how those parts relate to each other to communicate meaning)
How do we do this? Early language lessons should focus on chunks is like a (recommended) step 1 to use a language asap. then beyond common phrases, you’ll need more flexibility, you’ll want to go wide in your understanding so we want to start learning words. To create more specific phrases for your own.
Use Pareto’s Principle to find and bulldoze the 1000-1500 most common words (using Spaced repetition systems) to build a foundation of understanding the majority of parts in most messages. This will begin to develop our comprehension.
Understanding messages
Or the entire chunk
This is why language learning will start with greetings and simple interactions, it’s common, high-signal information that we will be trading with people.
The basic opening progresses into an infinitely complex game, instead of particular moves, you need to broaden into communication into broad topics. This is when chunking becomes less useful (common phrases). Instead of chunked information, we should go down into the building blocks of the chunked phrases, words. (high frequency pairs or small groups are also still great)
We’re presented with a problem when learning words. How do we define which ones we need? We use Pareto’s Principle here. Linguists have found there’s typically a few hundred to thousand words that will account for 70-90% of common conversation in a language.