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Creativity

Mathematician James Nickel on ‘The Unrelenting Issue of Intelligibility’

By Terence Gillespie August 1, 2019

James Nickel explains why mathematics work. Or, as scientists put it: “The Unrelenting Issue of Intelligibility.”

He also describes why most mathematical breakthroughs (and mathematicians) are driven by the pursuit of beauty rather than utility.

How could it be that mankind is able to predict behaviors in the universe based only on abstract mathematical principles “invented” in his mind?

Could it be that mathematics is the language of God’s creation?

Nickel expands on this theme and topics in his excellent book, Mathematics: Is God Silent?

Even better, he’s finally fulfilled his life-long ambition to create a math curriculum that inspires the student by tying math with wonder, meaning, applications, & philosophy. He calls it “The Dance of Number.” Perhaps the myth of mathematics having no applicability to life and daily inspirition are finally over!

Education

Former Atheist & Philosophy Professor Edward Feser On How Studying Philosophy Convinced Him of God’s Existence

By Guest Post January 31, 2019

By James Bishop

Philosopher Edward Feser perhaps has one of the most well articulated and detailed testimonies I recall having read (which at this point is quite a few). Feser is a professional philosopher after all, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Nonetheless, in this short post I have attempted to summarize Feser’s journey while also attempting to outline some of the key moments that had taken place within it. I am confident that this summarized testimony will be helpful to those who don’t necessarily have the time to read through the 7000 word testimony on Feser’s own website. However, I do encourage reading the full testimony for there is much in the details not included here.

As a way of biography, Feser is a well-known philosopher in the profession having penned numerous academic articles on several subjects ranging from the philosophy of mind to metaphysics. He is the Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College, previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. He has authored numerous books including Aquinas, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. Feser was also once an atheist naturalist until he converted to Christianity.

Feser explains that he was a convinced atheist naturalist for a period of 10 years in the 1990s and that his transition away from it “was no single event, but a gradual transformation.” He was brought up Catholic but ultimately lost his faith while a teenager around the age of 13 or 14. His atheism stayed with him well into his university years as a passionate philosophy student. While at university he discovered a new interest in existentialism and existentialist philosophers, particularly Soren Kierkegaard. This interest led him to discover other existentialists such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Kaufmann of whom he both appreciated but especially Kaufmann in particular. In the more modern philosophical climate, the atheist analytic philosopher J. L. Mackie proved appealing to Feser, and he considered Mackie’s book The Miracle of Theism to be a solid piece of philosophical work. Feser remarks that Mackie’s book was “intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for anything written by a “New Atheist.”” Philosopher Kai Nielsen would also appeal on issues of morality and religion. According to Feser,

What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief. If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed… Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth — something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

However, when he examined analytic philosophy in some more detail during the course of his studies it would, before long, bring his “youthful atheism down to earth.” The genesis of Feser’s transition away from atheism came about when he first began to look into the philosophy of language and logic. Over the several following years, during which he weighed information and arguments presented in his course materials, he reasoned that the existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning failed to satisfy,

I already knew from the lay of the land in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that the standard naturalist approaches had no solid intellectual foundation, and themselves rested as much on fashion as on anything else.

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Education

25 Of The Best Resources For Teaching Critical Thinking

By Guest Post January 29, 2019

by TeachThought Staff

Critical Thinking

As an organization, critical thinking is at the core of what we do, from essays and lists to models and teacher training. (You can check out What It Means To Think Critically for a wordier survey of the intent of critical thinking.)

For this post, we’ve gathered various critical thinking resources. As you’ll notice, conversation is a fundamental part of critical thinking, if for no other reason than the ability to identify a line of reasoning, analyze, evaluate, and respond to it accurately and thoughtfully is among the most common opportunities for critical thinking for students in everyday life. Who is saying what? What’s valid and what’s not? How should I respond?

This varied and purposely broad collection includes resources for teaching critical thinking, from books and videos to graphics and models, rubrics and taxonomies to presentations and debate communities. Take a look, and let us know in the comments which you found the most–or least–useful.

And for something in the way of specific training for staff, there’s always Professional Development on Critical Thinking provided by TeachThought.

25 Of The Best Resources For Teaching Critical Thinking

1. The TeachThought Taxonomy for Understanding, a taxonomy of thinking tasks broken up into 6 categories, with 6 tasks per category

2. A Collection Of Research On Critical Thinking by criticalthinking.org

3. It’s difficult to create a collection of critical thinking resources without talking about failures in thinking, so here’s A Logical Fallacies Primer in PowerPoint format.

4. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Test (it’s not free, but you can check out some samples here)

5. 6 Hats Thinking, a model for divergent thinking.

6. 4 Strategies for Teaching With Bloom’s Taxonomy

7. An Intro To Critical Thinking, a 10-minute video from wireless philosophy that takes given premises, and walks the viewer through valid and erroneous conclusions

8. Why Questions Are More Important Than Answers by Terry Heick

9. A Printable Flip Chart For Critical Thinking Questions (probably easier to buy one for a few bucks, but there it is nonetheless)

11. A Collection Of Bloom’s Taxonomy Posters

12. 6 Facets of Understanding by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

13. A 3D Model of Bloom’s Taxonomy

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Communication

The Best Website Fonts That Go Together in 2019

By Guest Post January 27, 2019

There are so many components to a killer website design. But all too often I see people overlook minor details, like typography.

I know what some of you might be thinking. How important can a website’s font really be?

Believe it or not, something as simple as choosing the right font can have a major impact on conversion. Plus, website fonts affect the overall appearance of your site.

Now it’s unlikely that you’ve been on a website and thought, “Wow! I absolutely love this font!”

This just isn’t something that our minds are trained to look for and I’m not expecting you to find a font that’s going to “wow” your website visitors. But, I can guarantee that you’ve been on websites that have fonts that were generic, unappealing, difficult to read, or felt out of place. You obviously don’t want people to have that impression of your website.

Why your website font matters

Here’s something to consider: different website fonts can change the reader’s perception of a particular topic.

Errol Morris conducted a survey in an article published in The New York Times in 2012. He included a passage from a book that claimed we live in an ear of unprecedented safety, and followed the passage up with two questions:

Is the claim true? (yes or no)
How confident are you with the answer? (slightly, moderately, very)

As it turns out, Morris didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. He just wanted to know if the font could influence their answers. Forty thousand people unknowingly participated in this experiment. While everyone read the same passage; they did not all see it in the same typography.

Check out these results.

This graph shows all of the respondents who agreed to the first question. Morris took their levels of confidence in the second question and assigned a weighted value to each response.

In doing so, it’s clear that there was a difference between how confident people were in agreeing with the claims being made based on the font they were presented in. Now let’s look and see the results of respondents who disagreed with the passage.

Compare the two graphs. Do you notice any similarities?

As you can see, the Baskerville font was ranked highest for weighted agreement and lowest for weighted disagreement. Comic Sans font ranked lowest for weighted agreement, and ranked high for weighted disagreement.

Based on this data, Morris was able to conclude that fonts can influence the way people perceive information. Basically, the typeface can actually affect the credibility of your website.

In short — yes, website fonts matter.

The best Google Font pairings for 2019

You don’t want to have the same font everywhere on your site; that’s too boring. Mix it up! But make sure you pick fonts that go well together. I created this guide to help you do just that.

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Children

The Story of “First Words”

By Terence Gillespie November 13, 2018

On a recent trip to Colombia, I was determined to teach our two boys Spanish. It was a six-week trip, and I quickly ran into two problems.

Immersion was Unavailable

The first problem was the Spanish speaking children our boys found to play with saw them as an opportunity to practice their English. We’d flown all the way to South America to be immersed in Spanish, but we couldn’t escape English.

The second problem was me. I didn’t know the language well enough to provide parental services in Spanish only. In other words, hanging out with dad was no immersion experience, either.

An Optimal Beginning?

What I needed was an optimal way to begin. If the first thing presented to the boys was frustrating, they might lose interest in Spanish altogether. That’s what happened to me in high school, college, and three other Spanish courses that seemed promising. Something didn’t click, and I didn’t know why.

With my children’s language acquisition at stake, I was determined to get to the bottom of flaws in the traditional approach that hadn’t worked for me.

Eureka!

While scouring the web for solutions, the eureka moment came when I discovered A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Mark Davies. Davies used computers to analyze 20 million words of Spanish across three “registers” of fiction, nonfiction, and radio. His dictionary lists the top 5000 most frequently used words in the Spanish language. All the more stunning is how important these words are to new language learners.

Using English as a comparison, Davies estimates that you would understand ~90% of every word spoken or written in Spanish if you knew the top 3000 words. And, your comprehension would rise to 95% if you knew the top 5000 words.¹²

What better way to learn a language than by focusing on learning the most frequently used words first?

Purifying the Gold

Merely presenting Davies list to the boys would have been great, but I wondered if we could do better. After scouring through all 5000 words, I noticed that many of them were similar to the same words in English. In fact, every other word had similarities.

In all, I found ~10% of them (532 words) were nearly identical in spelling and meaning in both Spanish and English. Such words are called perfect cognates, and there are lots of them on Davies’ list.

What if I focused the kids on learning these related words first?

Even Better

With 532 perfect words to begin learning Spanish, I wondered if I could make the boys learning experience even better.

My studies revealed how pronunciation and ear tuning is crucial to language acquisition. Was it possible to have each word pronounced for the boys in perfect Spanish?

Yes! I could ask their grandmother to present the list to the boys. She is a native Colombiana and would pronounce each word correctly!

For my own learning, I switched my smartphone and tablet settings to Spanish. Words and sentences could then be highlighted and read aloud in Spanish. I don’t know if Paulina or Juan are real people, but they taught me how to pronounce thousands of words in Spanish!

From Gold to Platinum

Since returning from our trip, I’ve found four more ways to improve on the optimal first words we discovered for learning Spanish. Each improvement stems from observing the best learning techniques I could find:

Associate each word with a picture.
Have each word read aloud, automatically, using Native pronunciation (in case your Colombian grandmother isn’t available.)
Keep track of progress and the words they have trouble with and present those words differently.

To accomplish the first three, I found a digital flashcard app called Anki (the Japanese word for memory.) Anki does 1,2 and 3 and uses an algorithm to show the words you’re having trouble with more frequently until you get them down. Words you have no problem with are only displayed when you’re just about to forget them (which turns out to be the best way to improve your recall.)

Anki is free and works on all platforms. Here’s what some of “First Words” looks like on the desktop, smartphone, and tablet:

The 4rth Improvement

The 4rth improvement was discovered by going back through Davies’ list. What would be the next ideal batch of Spanish words to learn?

By allowing for words that have up to three characters difference between English and Spanish (but still have the same meaning) it wasn’t hard to find a second optimal batch of 500 words. These allow for minor spelling changes such as replacing the ’t’ with ‘c’ in ’edición’ vs. ‘edition’ and ‘nacional’ vs. national. They also allow for an ‘o’ or ‘a’ after the word as in ‘humano’ vs. ‘human’ and ‘diferente’ vs. ‘different.’

It’s a rare (non-existent?) student who might be thrown off by the minor spelling changes I’ve allowed for in the ‘non-perfect’ portion of the list. But the payoff is enormous!

If you combine the first (532) and second (500) word lists, 787 of them are in the top 3000. These words are used so frequently in Spanish, you’ll rarely read or hear a sentence formed without one!

Hiding in Plain Sight for 100 Years

Before 2006, these words were hidden in plain sight due to the absence of a robust frequency dictionary.³ Since then, “First Words” may be the first serious effort to identify all cognates in the top 5000 and present them in an optimal learning format (Anki digital flashcards.)

It took a while, but I eventually input all 1032 words into digital flashcards. Each word has just the right picture, and each is pronounced by a native Spanish speaker. Words you learn easily are only re-presented when you’re just about to forget them (to optimize recall.) Words you find harder are presented more often until they are learned.

The results have been worth it. Not only are my boys off to an optimal start, but the cards can also be made available to others to set upon their own optimal start in learning Spanish!

Suitable for ALL Ages

In case you’re wondering what this looks like, here’s our youngest going through his Spanish cards for the day.

Many of the top 1000 cognates are advanced words that young children may not yet know in their native English. Nevertheless, they are the most frequently used words in the Spanish language and, therefore, pure gold for anyone learning Spanish.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A Frequency Dictionary of Modern Spanish, Routlegde: “Nation (1990) has shown that the 4,000–5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 percent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 percent of speech. While Nation’s results were for English, they do at least present the possibility that, by allowing frequency to be a general guide to vocabulary learning, one task facing learners – to acquire a lexicon which will serve them well on most occasions most of the time – could be achieved quite easily.” ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩
There have been a number of other frequency dictionaries and lists for Spanish (Buchanan 1927, Eaton 1940, Rodríguez Bou 1952, García Hoz 1953, Juilland and Chang-Rodríguez 1964, Alameda and Cuetos 1995, Sebastián, Carreiras, and Cuetos 2000), but all of these suffer from significant limitations. ↩

Children

Free at Last from Spanish Gender Noun Prison!

By Terence Gillespie September 25, 2018

One of the banes of my “Must Learn Spanish” existence has been the INSANE practice of assigning a gender to EVERY NOUN in the language! As a native English speaker, I didn’t know how good I had it, to be free of this nonsense.

The only thing that used to calm me down on the “issue” was knowing how many other great languages share the same burden: Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian.

Well, I’m here to say that I’m FREE AT LAST from the gender-noun Spanish prison! And you can be too, by reading the short 197 words I’ve written, below, to break our family out of this jail. It’s as close to a get-out-of-jail-free card that you’re ever likely to find.

Masculine and Feminine Nouns

All Spanish nouns and pronouns are grammatically linked to the masculine (m.) or the feminine (f.) gender (“Gender” is a grammatical property and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with biological gender.)

It’s important to get these gender associations right because adjectives, articles, possessives, and demonstratives must also agree in gender with the noun or pronoun to which they relate. Therefore, getting the gender of a noun “wrong” can become an amplified mistake.

Fortunately, this arbitrary (and somewhat ridiculous) language burden is ** dramatically** eased by the following consistent patterns:.

Nouns referring to males are masculine.
Nouns referring to females are feminine.
Nouns ending in -o, -or, -aje, -men, -gen are masculine.
Nouns ending in -a, -ad, -ed, -ud, -ión, -umbre, -ie are feminine.
Many abstract nouns ending in -ma are masculine, (el problema, el tema, ‘theme,’ el clima, el drama, el problema, el sistema, el programa.)

Since the gender of a noun is arbitrary and their number is infinite, I disagree with teachers who say it’s best to learn the gender of a noun along with the noun itself. It’s far easier to internalize the patterns, above while taking note of any exceptions. Here’s the pattern for making nouns plural:

21 Flashcards

It took 21 flashcards to review the complete gender-noun pattern in Spanish. I made the cards using Anki’s SRS (Spaced Repetition System.) As each card is flipped, the example sentence is read aloud in perfect Spanish.

It won’t be long before they are able to forget about gender for the rest of their lives!

Bonus: Plurals in 75 Words

If a noun ends in:
1. A vowel, add -s (libro/libros, puerta/puertas.)
2. A consonant, add -es (pared/paredes, profesor/profesores.)
3. -z, change it to a -c and add -es (lápiz/lápices, luz/luces.)
4. The masculine plural is used if a group involves one or more masculine nouns: (e.g.,
Tengo muy buenos amigos (m. pl.), I have very good friends (where the friends may be male or a mixture of male
and female.)

Español

500 Optimal First Words to Learn in Spanish (that You Already Know)

By Terence Gillespie September 7, 2018

What are the most optimal first words to learn in Spanish for English speakers?

After putting more thought into it than I care to admit, the answer seems obvious (in retrospect.) Actually, you already know them, but probably didn’t realize they were Spanish words as well as English. More importantly, they are high frequently words. Spanish speakers use them all the time, and so will you if you learn Spanish. In fact, you already use them all the time, but in English.

Three Optimal Things

Three things about these words make them optimal first words to learn in Spanish:

They are very frequently used.
You already know them.
You can focus exclusively on learning to pronounce them (since you already know them.)

Too good to be true? That was my first reaction when I created the list. As you’ll see, it’s more like “the time has finally come.”

Hiding in Plain Sight for Centuries

These words have been hiding in plain sight for centuries. They are perfect (285), and near-perfect (226), high-frequency English-Spanish cognates. That is, they have the same spelling and meaning in English and Spanish and are (very) frequency used in both languages.

What’s kept them hidden is not knowing which cognates (of thousands) are the most frequently used. All the words on the 500 Optimal First Words list are in the top 5000 most frequently used words in Spanish. And 277 of them are in the top 3000! That makes them pure gold for the student first learning Spanish.

To put that in perspective, you would understand ~90% of every word spoken or written in Spanish if you knew the top 3000 words. And, your comprehension would rise to 95% if you understood the top 5000 words.[1][2]

All this, and yet, for English speakers learning Spanish, it gets (much) better.

50% of the Top 5000 Words in Spanish are Cognates!

Yes, it’s true. English speakers who want to learn Spanish get a 50% head start on the most critical words in the language.

After learning that they exist, and how to pronounce them, English speakers can say plenty (in Spanish) after learning a bit of grammar. That’s a reversal of the common complaint of being made to learn grammar and having no vocabulary with which to say anything.

To get to 50%, the top cognate verbs must be included. Verbs make up 477 of these 2500 cognates in the top 50%. As in any language, you’ll have to learn how to use verbs. But, 477 of them will be words whose meaning you already understand.

Why Doesn’t Every Spanish Teacher Start with This List?

They probably will. But, until now, it’s been impossible to formulate such a list without a decent frequency dictionary.

There’ve been six efforts to create a Spanish frequency dictionary starting in 1927.[3] They all suffered from significant limitations before Mark Davies’ breakthrough version in 2006 (book title here). That was only 12 years ago.

It takes exposure and lots of time to incorporate new information into accepted pedagogy. To my knowledge, even online curriculum providers are just starting to integrate Davies’ work into their approach to teaching Spanish.

The Cost of Cognate Acquisition: Pronunciation

You already know what they mean, how to spell them, and how to pronounce them in English. But you can’t use them in Spanish until you can pronounce them in a way that a Spanish speaker can hear them. And you have to tune your ear so that you can hear and understand them when spoken in Spanish, as well.

English and Spanish share an almost identical alphabet. But Spanish is pronounced differently enough, that the same exact word (spelled the same, with the same meaning) is unlikely to be understood if you don’t pronounce it, correctly.

Listen to a Spanish Native Speaking Perfect English

If you don’t believe me about how important pronunciation is, (and have a smartphone or tablet) go to your settings and change your language to Spanish. Then, highlight an English sentence and have it read aloud to you by the Spanish voice (which uses the Spanish rules of pronunciation.)

Don’t be surprised when “Juan” or “Paulina,” says something incomprehensible. How could that be? You’ve highlighted a correctly written English sentence to be read aloud!? Yes, and you’re hearing how a native Spanish speaker would pronounce that English sentence using the Spanish rules of pronunciation. It sounds like gibberish to an English listener.

By the way, that’s the way you sound, in reverse, to Spanish speakers when you pronounce correctly written Spanish sentences using the English rules of pronunciation.

Same Words, Worlds Apart

When in Colombia on a recent trip and talking with my aunt (who only speaks Spanish) I was finally able to form perfect Spanish sentences and was excited to say something that involved the word ‘video.’ Imagine my surprise when she had no idea what I was talking about!

The problem? I pronounced ‘video’ like the English word that it is. In Spanish, ‘vidéo’ has an accent over the second syllable. Trust me when I tell you that ‘video’ and ‘vidéo’ mean the same thing, but are worlds apart when mispronounced from your listener’s point of view.

Unless each speaker adjusts their pronunciation to the listener’s language, even perfectly formed sentences using the same alphabet (In either English or Spanish) sound like gibberish!

We might remember this when tempted to criticize each other’s “accents.”

Perfect and Non-Perfect Cognates

285 words in the 500 Optimal First Words list are perfect cognates. They have the same meaning and are spelled the same, in English and Spanish. I’ve allowed for the Spanish accent mark placed over the same letter, e.g., mamá vs. mama, réplica vs. replica. I’ve also allowed for words spelled with two letters in English, ‘accessible,’ but only one letter in Spanish, ‘accesible.’

The 226 non-perfect cognates on the list allow for minor spelling changes such as replacing the ‘t’ with ‘c’ in ‘edición’ vs. ‘edition’ and ‘nacional’ vs. national. They also allow for an ‘o’ or ‘a’ after the word as in ‘humano’ vs. ‘human’ and ‘diferente’ vs. ‘different.’

It’s a rare (non-existent?) student who might be thrown off by the minor spelling changes I’ve allowed for in the ‘non-perfect’ portion of the list. I’ve kept it strict to enable the student to focus almost exclusively on pronunciation.

But What about Verbs & Grammar?

Cognates should come first. Every cognate you learn (to pronounce) in the top 5000 is pure gold! In fact, you rarely hear a Spanish sentence without one.

I’m teaching my children to go as far as they want with cognates until they’re ready for a change of subject or pace. Besides that, they are only 9 and 5 years old, and many of the cognates are words they are learning in English for the first time. That’s double points for homeschoolers!

Verb Cognates

There are 477 near-cognate Spanish verbs in the top 5000. But verb endings in the infinitive are “foreign” to the English ear, and more than two letters need be modified from their English counterpart. Therefore, the low-hanging fruit of noun and adjective cognates should come first, in my opinion. Only then can the student focus exclusively on pronunciation (crucial skill #1) and ear-training (crucial skill #2) from the start.

Grammar Madness

Putting grammar before words is demotivating. Why put students through a grammar lesson when they have no words with which to apply that grammar?

By learning cognates first, the student emerges with lots of words and excellent pronunciation.

The First 100

Here’s the first 100 of the 500 optimal first words list. Four words appear twice: once as a noun, and again as an adjective. The fact that these words (solo, final, presente, and total) appear twice in the top 5000 words makes them pure gold. Instead of being disappointed that they’re the same, celebrate them as getting two high-frequency words in one. But, just in case it makes you feel cheated, I’ve added four more to the list for a total of 104.

The First 100 Optimal First Words to Learn in Spanish
Word	IPA	Function	Frequency
solo	’solo	adv.	102
momento		m.noun	108
solo	’solo	adj.	160
problema		m.noun	169
historia		f.noun	192
idea	i’ðea	f.noun	193
familia	faˈmi.lja	f.noun	201
importante		adj.	207
humano		adj.	218
posible		adj.	225
general	xene’ɾal	adj.	227
relación		f.noun	230
situación		f.noun	268
social	so’θjal	adj.	280
español		adj.	285
final		mf.noun	307
condición		f.noun	341
color	koˈloɾ	m.noun	359
experiencia		f.noun	361
diferente		adj.	365
natural	natu’ɾal	adj.	414
atención		f.noun	441
real	re’al	adj.	462
ocasión	oka’sjon	f.noun	463
favor	fa’βoɾ	m.noun	468
principal	pɾinθi’pal	adj.	496
animal	a.niˈmal	m.noun	497
base	’base	f.noun	498
posición		f.noun	503
nacional		adj.	507
superior	supe’ɾjor	adj.	535
función		f.noun	543
grave	’gɾaβe	adj.	548
decisión	deθi’sjon	f.noun	549
música	ˈmu.si.ka	f.noun	550
expresión	ekspɾe’sjon	f.noun	555
producto		m.noun	589
personal	peɾ.soˈnal	adj.	590
imposible	im.poˈsi.βle	adj.	592
plan	’plan	m.noun	598
origen	o.ɾiˈxen	m.noun	606
interior	in.te.ˈɾjoɾ	m.noun	614
profesor	pɾo.feˈsoɾ	m-f.noun	621
total	to’tal	adj.	629
opinión	o.piˈnjon	f.noun	632
profesional	pɾo.fe.sjoˈnal	adj.	640
capital	ka.pi.ˈtal	mf.noun	651
material	ma.teˈɾjal	m.noun	656
simple	’simple	adj.	661
normal	noɾ’mal	adj.	664
actual	äk’twäl	adj.	676
información		f.noun	682
popular	popu’laɾ	adj.	709
error	eˈroɾ	m.noun	738
reunión	rew’njon	f.noun	746
final	fi’nal	mf.noun	771
civil	θiˈβil	adj.	774
doctor	d̪okˈtor	m-f.noun	778
construcción		f.noun	794
presente		m.noun	802
director	di.ɾek’toɾ	m-f.noun	816
radio	ˈra.ðjo	mf.noun	824
educación		f.noun	845
operación		f.noun	848
particular	paɾtiku’laɾ	adj.	854
solución		f.noun	871
intención		f.noun	876
control	kon’tɾol	m.noun	889
conversación		f.noun	892
generación		f.noun	906
visión	bi’sjon	f.noun	908
labor	la’βoɾ	f.noun	930
revolución		f.noun	957
maestro	ma’estɾo	m.noun	961
plaza	’plaθa	f.noun	1020
sensación		f.noun	1023
obligación		f.noun	1040
total	to’tal	m.noun	1043
región	re.ˈxjon	f.noun	1050
discusión	dis.ku’sjon	f.noun	1055
central	θen.ˈtɾal	adj.	1062
televisión	te.le.βiˈsjon	f.noun	1078
moral	mo.ˈɾal	adj.	1082
crisis	ˈkɾi.sis	f.noun	1085
presente		m.noun	1088
sector	sek’tor	m.noun	1096
accidente		m.noun	1098
oficial	ofi’θjal	adj.	1099
intelectual	intelek’twal	adj.	1103
institución		f.noun	1115
conclusión	konklu’sjon	f.noun	1138
exterior	eks.teˈɾioɾ	adj.	1163
cámara	ˈka.ma.ɾa	f.noun	1172
creación		f.noun	1173
internacional		adj.	1189
original	o.ɾi.xi’nal	adj.	1191
profesión	pɾofe’sjon	f.noun	1206
honor	o’noɾ	m.noun	1211
organización		f.noun	1243
café	kaˈfe	m.noun	1250
americano		adj.	1261
interior	in.te.ˈɾjoɾ	m.noun	1263
cultural	kul’tuɾal	adj.	1277
hospital	os.piˈtal	m.noun	1298

Anki Deck with All 500 Words

I’ve made an Anki flashcard deck with all 500 words. Anki is a free digital flashcard program that enables the use of pictures, audio, video, and has lots of other great features to optimize recall. The cards can be viewed on a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

After you’ve viewed a card twice, Anki uses a spaced repetition algorithm to show you the card again at just the right time to optimize recall. This is called SRS or spaced repetition system and it was invented by Dr. Piotr Wozniak.

Each word in the 500 Optimal First Words deck has a picture, audio pronunciation in perfect Spanish, the IPA symbol, the function of the word, and its frequency rank in Spanish.

There are two cards for each word so they can be viewed forwards (Word on the front, picture and sound on the back) and backward (Picture on the front, word and sound on the back.)

These flashcards are suitable for anyone learning Spanish. The pictures are the best illustration of the word I could find and are also child-friendly. Here’s what the cards look like after both sides have been revealed.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A Frequency Dictionary of Modern Spanish, Routlegde: “Nation (1990) has shown that the 4,000–5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 percent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 percent of speech. While Nation’s results were for English, they do at least present the possibility that, by allowing frequency to be a general guide to vocabulary learning, one task facing learners – to acquire a lexicon which will serve them well on most occasions most of the time – could be achieved quite easily.” ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩
There have been a number of other frequency dictionaries and lists for Spanish (Buchanan 1927, Eaton 1940, Rodríguez Bou 1952, García Hoz 1953, Juilland and Chang-Rodríguez 1964, Alameda and Cuetos 1995, Sebastián, Carreiras, and Cuetos 2000), but all of these suffer from significant limitations. ↩

Children

Aventuras de un Papá Educando en el Hogar Parte 5: Tomando Vacaciones en un Idioma

By Terence Gillespie June 27, 2018

Nuestras vacaciones familiares este año son para Colombia, Sudamérica, para visitar a familiares y aprender español. Afortunadamente, nos quedamos con la familia todo el tiempo. Sin gastos de hotel, nuestro viaje de seis semanas costará poco más que un viaje a Florida.

Bienvenido A Colombia

En contraste con la imagen que la mayoría de los estadounidenses tienen de Colombia, dos tercios del país y todas las ciudades principales están en las montañas. Estamos hablando de grandes montañas cubiertas de nieve con retiros de cabañas de estilo suizo. Por ejemplo, la elevación del terreno en Bogotá es de 8.660 pies o 1/2 milla más alta que Denver. Aunque nuestra visita está más cerca del ecuador, todavía está en las montañas. Incluso cerca del ecuador, aquellos con los medios para vivir a mayor altitud pueden escapar del calor tropical.

Idioma y Familia

De todas las muchas razones para visitar Colombia, este viaje es sobre familia e idioma. Es hora de que nuestros muchachos readquieran el idioma español al que han estado expuestos desde su nacimiento. Eso les permitirá hablar con sus familiares mientras disfrutan de muchos otros beneficios de saber español.

Puntos de Partida

Mi esposa habla español e inglés perfecto sin acento detectable en ninguno de los idiomas. Sus padres tienen un acento en inglés, pero lo han estado hablando con fluidez durante décadas.

Como los padres de mi esposa viven con nosotros, nuestros hijos han estado expuestos al español y al inglés desde el momento en que nacieron. Como era de esperar, su discurso fue “retrasado”. Sin embargo, su español comenzó a desaparecer desde su primer día de escuela privada. Mi esposa y yo estamos ansiosos por traerlo a la superficie más pronto, en lugar de más tarde.

He incursionado en español desde la escuela secundaria y he podido viajar cómodamente en América Latina. Puedo leer español razonablemente bien, pero gran parte de eso se debe a la familiaridad con las raíces latinas y griegas. En cuanto a hablar el idioma, las ilusiones de fluidez desaparecen rápidamente entre los taxistas chilenos. No hace falta mucho esfuerzo para no entender una sola palabra en los últimos 30 segundos antes de darme cuenta de que no estoy hablando efectivamente con nadie.

Para ser justos, el español chileno y el argentino se hablan notablemente rápido y tienen muchos modismos. Pueden dejar desesperados incluso a hablantes nativos de español por una consonante bien definida o dos.

El Vínculo Débil, Padre o Ambos

Cuando se trata de hablar español, soy el eslabón débil de nuestra familia. No creo que eso importe tanto a los chicos si yo no fuera su padre. Por alguna razón, el lenguaje del padre parece tener un efecto más fuerte en el lenguaje de los niños que el de otros miembros de la familia. Por ejemplo, soy un lector voraz y mis amigos dicen que mi vocabulario (en inglés) se está extendiendo a los niños. Desafortunadamente, el hecho de que solo hable inglés en la casa también está contribuyendo a su falta de interés en el español. Por el contrario, el español perfecto que mi esposa y parientes políticos hablan continuamente no les está llegando a los muchachos.

La responsabilidad, por lo tanto, está en mí. Si quiero que los niños aprendan español, voy a tener que aprenderlo primero. Afortunadamente, he tenido un comienzo bastante largo y prolongado.

Cerrando el Laguna Inglés

Cuando mi esposa y parientes políticos hablan entre ellos, siempre es en español. Hablan inglés solo cuando estoy cerca. Los niños usan esto como una escapatoria para escapar de las dificultades de aprender español. Una de nuestras tácticas es cerrar esta laguna. Para hacer eso, papá necesita hablar español en la casa.

Alcanzar la Fluidez de la Base

Yo diría que la capacidad de llevar a cabo los asuntos cotidianos de la casa en español (solo) califica como fluidez básica. Los profesores de español dicen que esto requeriría ~ 2000 palabras de vocabulario, la capacidad de conjugar 10 verbos esenciales en el tiempo presente, pasado y futuro, y la comprensión de una lista relativamente corta de reglas gramaticales críticas. Sin embargo, dado que no estoy empezando de cero, me gustaría llevarlo un poco más allá.

Sobreaprendizaje

Me encantaría poder traducir mi escritura al español y, algún día, escribir en español. Usando el vocabulario en inglés como un indicador aproximado, conocer las 5000 palabras utilizadas con mayor frecuencia permite comprender ~ 95% del texto escrito.¹

Nation (1990)² ha demostrado que las 4,000-5,000 palabras más frecuentes representan hasta el 95 por ciento de un texto escrito y las 1,000 palabras más frecuentes representan el 85 por ciento del habla. Si bien los resultados de Nation fueron para inglés, al menos presentan la posibilidad de que, al permitir que la frecuencia sea una guía general para el aprendizaje del vocabulario, una tarea que enfrentan los estudiantes: adquirir un léxico que les sirva en la mayoría de las ocasiones la mayor parte del tiempo. podría lograrse con bastante facilidad.

Sería molesto no entender una de cada 20 palabras en inglés (95% de comprensión). Sin embargo, suponiendo que las mismas estadísticas se mantengan generalmente en español, estaría encantado de tener esa instalación con Español.

Para la perspectiva, el vocabulario para el porcentaje de comprensión del inglés se desarrolla de la siguiente manera:

1000 palabras: 85% del habla
2000 palabras: 92% del discurso
5000 palabras: 95% del texto escrito

La curva exponencial comienza en 1000 y se aplana en 5000 palabras. Estoy excediendo el objetivo de fluidez de base e intentando 5000 en este viaje. Teóricamente, eso me permite tener que buscar solo una palabra de las veinte al escribir o hacer traducciones entre inglés y español.

Espero aprender pronto (sentir y experimentar) cómo estas estimaciones resultan útiles para escribir, hablar y traducir. Sin duda, se necesitará una buena cantidad de gramática para desatar el poder de todas estas palabras nuevas.

Una ventaja de aumentar mis metas para la fluidez en español es que aprenderé en exceso el idioma necesario para las conversaciones en la casa. Incluso si lleva mucho tiempo alcanzar mis metas más altas, hablar en español por la casa para el beneficio de los niños será una brisa relativa. También me inclinaré menos a “hacer trampa” cuando esté bajo estrés para communicarme.

Primeros Pasos para Los Chicos

Mientras trabajo para cerrar el laguna inglés, les he dado a los niños una lista ilustrada de 625 de las palabras más usadas para aprender en español. En realidad, su abuelita les está ayudando a repasar la lista. Ella está haciendo que todo sea divertido y pronunciando cada palabra como un Colombiana nativa. Eso viene naturalmente a la abuelita porque ella es una Colombiana nativa.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A frequency dictionary of modern Spanish, Routlegde ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩

Homeschooling

Adventures of a Homeschooling Dad Part 5: Taking a Language Vacation

By Terence Gillespie June 15, 2018

Our family vacation this year is to Colombia, South America, to visit relatives and learn Spanish. Thankfully, we’re staying with family the whole time. With no hotel expenses, our six-week trip will cost little more than a trip to Florida!

Bienvenido A Colombia

In contrast to the image most Americans have of Colombia, two-thirds of the country and all of the major cities are in the mountains. We’re talking big snow-covered mountains with Swiss-style chalet retreats. For example, the ground elevation in Bogota is 8,660 feet or 1/2 mile higher than Denver. Although our visit is closer to the equator, it’s still in the mountains. Even close to the equator, those with the means to live at higher altitudes can escape the tropical heat.

Language & Family

Of all the many reasons to visit Colombia, this trip is about family and language. It’s time for our boys to reacquire the Spanish language they’ve been exposed to since birth. That will enable them to talk with their relatives while enjoying many other benefits of knowing Spanish.

Starting Points

My wife speaks perfect Spanish and English with no detectable accent in either language. Her parents have an accent in Engish but have been speaking it fluently for decades.

Since my wife’s parents live with us, our sons have been exposed to Spanish and English from the time they were born. Their speech was predictably “delayed” as a result. However, their Spanish started to disappear from their first day of private school. My wife and I are keen to bring it back to the surface sooner, rather than later.

I’ve dabbled in Spanish since high-school and have been able to travel comfortably in Latin America. I can read Spanish reasonably well, but much of that is due to familiarity with Latin and Greek roots. As for actually speaking the language, illusions of fluency disappear quickly around Chilean taxi drivers. It doesn’t take many spurts of not understanding a single word for the last 30 seconds before realizing that I’m not effectively talking with anyone.

To be fair, Chilean and Argentinian Spanish are spoken notoriously fast and have lots of idioms. They can leave even native Spanish speakers desperate for a well-defined consonant or two.

The Weak Link, Father, or Both

When it comes to speaking Spanish, I’m the weak link in our family. I don’t think that would matter so much to the boys if I weren’t also their father. For some reason, the language of the father seems to have a stronger effect on the language of the children than that of other family members. For example, I’m a voracious reader and friends say my (English) vocabulary is spilling over to the boys. Unfortunately, the fact that I speak only English around the house is also contributing to their lack of interest in Spanish. In contrast, the perfect Spanish my wife and in-laws talk continually is not getting through to the boys.

The onus, therefore, is on me. If I want the boys to learn Spanish, I’m going to have to learn it first. Happily, I’ve had a rather long and drawn out headstart.

Closing the English Loophole

When my wife and in-laws talk to each other, it’s always in Spanish. They speak English only when I’m around. The boys use this as a loophole to escape the difficulties of learning Spanish. One of our tactics is to close this loophole. To do that, Dad needs to speak Spanish around the house.

Reaching Base Fluency

I’d say the ability to conduct everyday affairs around the house in Spanish (only) qualifies as base fluency. Spanish teachers say this would require ~2000 words of vocabulary, the ability to conjugate an essential 10 verbs into the present, past, and future tenses, and the grasp of a relatively short list of critical grammar rules. However, since I’m not starting from scratch, I’d like to take it a little further.

Overlearning

I would love to be able to translate my English writing into Spanish and, someday, write in Spanish. Using English vocabulary as a rough gauge, knowing the most frequently used 5000 words enables one to comprehend ~95% of written text.¹

Nation (1990)² has shown that the 4,000–5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95 percent of a written text and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85 percent of speech. While Nation’s results were for English, they do at least present the possibility that, by allowing frequency to be a general guide to vocabulary learning, one task facing learners – to acquire a lexicon which will serve them well on most occasions most of the time – could be achieved quite easily.

It would be annoying to not understand one out of 20 English words (95% comprehension.) However, presuming the same stats hold generally true for Spanish, I’d be thrilled to have that facility with Español.

For perspective, the vocabulary to percentage comprehension of English breaks out as follows:

1000 Words: 85% of speech
2000 Words: 92% of speech
5000 Words: 95% of written text

The exponential curve starts at 1000 and flattens out at 5000 words. I’m overshooting the goal for base fluency and trying for 5000 on this trip. Theoretically, that well leave me only having to look up one word out of twenty when writing or doing translations between English and Spanish.

I hope to soon learn (feel, and experience) how these estimates pan out for writing, speaking, and translating. No doubt, a fair amount of grammar will be needed to unleash the power of all these new words.

An advantage to raising my goals for Spanish fluency is that I’ll be overlearning the language needed for conversations around the house. Even if it takes a long time to reach my higher goals, talking in Spanish around the house for the benefit of the kids will be a relative breeze. I’ll also be less inclined to “cheat” when under stress to communicate.

First Steps for the Boys

While I’m working to close the English loophole, I’ve given the kids an illustrated list of 625 of the most frequently used words to learn in Spanish. Actually, their abuelita is helping them go through the list. She is making everything fun and pronouncing every word like a native Colombiana. That comes naturally to abuelita because she is a native Colombiana.

Davies, Mark, 2006, A frequency dictionary of modern Spanish, Routlegde ↩
Nation, I. S. P. (1990), Teaching and learning vocabulary, Boston: Heinle and Heinle. ↩

Children

Transcript: What Does ‘Educated’ Mean? — John Taylor Gatto

By Terence Gillespie February 21, 2018

This transcript is of an outstanding speech given by John Taylor Gatto on what it means to be truly educated.

John gives his ideas on how education should be framed and what he thinks makes for an educated person. He also details the characteristics of both an Amish education and that of the best boarding schools in the country.

I’ve read most of John’s books and this speech is the best framing of what it means to be truly educated. For parents who want to get started homeschooling their children, this is the perfect place to start.

The transcript is ~11,000 words with the video running 1 hour, 17 minutes. The excerpts, below, are 1/10 of the whole transcript.

(Note: All text, below, is John Taylor Gatto speaking)

Challenge Assumptions

One of the universal marks of an educated man or woman is that they know how to challenge assumptions. They don’t believe everything strangers tell them.

10 Kinds of Awareness to Build On

In the beginning of planning a curriculum, I think you need to consider ten separate kinds of awareness around which self-knowledge and self-awareness are built. The first is a personal reality.

We all need to know as much as we can about our relatives and our ancestors. What were their cultures? What are their cultures? What’re their situations, their goals, their struggles? Then, you need to inventory, by carefully testing your own talents and weaknesses, your own limits that come from your biological and cultural heritage. You just need to get a kind of profile yourself. it doesn’t happen in a week or a month; it’s an ongoing thing. I probably spend a little bit of time every day, at an advanced age thinking, about every single one of my relatives and wondering what part of me I can feel in harmony with that particular person.

Then, you need to have an intimate knowledge of history. I think you need to know local history, regional history, national history, and global history. Starting about 1917, the teaching of history in the United States was systematically and deliberately destroyed so that you wouldn’t be able to step back from your own life and figure out what on earth is going on.

On the other hand, I have some good news for you. It’s a fairly easy and greatly satisfying thing to self-correct that. So, an intimate knowledge of history that would include political history, and cultural history, maybe the history of labor, the history of science and technology, and other relevant forms, that’s the second thing.

The Amish Example

The Amish are a group of 150,000 well-mannered, prosperous, law-abiding people who came to America with little more than the clothes on their back. So they didn’t have any contacts to make the way easy for them and they have been persecuted by the state of Pennsylvania, the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio for the whole century.

So everybody’s heard about the Amish, but very few people know the astonishing details, and here they are. Virtually every adult Amish-er has an independent livelihood as the owner of a farm or a business.

The Amish realized that new government schools were social separators built on the principle of mechanical milk separators. They whirl a young mind about until both the social structure of the parents and their coherent consciousness are fragmented. Schools separate children from their personal past and from the past of the culture.

Education, as the government called it, separated people from the daily content of life dividing the world into disciplines, courses, classes, grades and teachers who remain strangers to their children in all but name. Even religion in a government school, if it was mentioned, would be studied analyzed and separated from the family and from daily life. It would become just another subject for critical analysis. Specialists armed with books, separated from the Amish and culture and training, would be entrusted with rearing their children and would encourage their children to liberate themselves from the shackles of home. For what purpose? To jump where? In what direction? of course the school, after it breaks your kids away from you, has no idea.

Boarding School Model

Now let’s take a look at what the parents of the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling.

I’ve been studying their expectations for 20 years, now, in order to compare them with my own goals. And I think you’ll find this interesting even if you don’t agree with all of it. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent. There are only 20 of them, and some of them say there aren’t 20, there are only 18.

But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or st. Paul’s could. And I’m going to give you these ideas in no particular order of importance. You decide which of these are important.

Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So their manners would be reflexive.

That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person. Now tell me, does it cost anything at all to teach people good manners? I run into ghetto kids who are as mannerly as anybody on earth.

Undiluted Hard Knowledge

The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down. I never taught any kids younger than 8th graders. But I will tell you that we started in eighth grade with Moby Dick, and as soon as I found out that the school edition had all the hard words and ideas taken out, I just threw it away and went out and bought enough copies for my kids and myself with a real thing. I mean Moby Dick’s is as hard a book to read as I think exists. This is your tough book to read. And what I found was after an initial struggle, maybe it lasted two weeks, the truth is that the dumbest kid and the brightest kid were thrilled with all these ideas interacting with each other and they could see the difference between the plotline of hunting a whale and all the ideas that spun out of the interaction of the crew and the officers and the captain with each other. I mean, it was a thrilling thing to do and I the truth is by that time I had lived in New York for a while, I was tremendously bored with what they handed me to teach.

If you pick up a bestseller from 1818, that would be James Fenimore Cooper’s last of the Mohicans, and you make sure that it’s unexpurgated, you will find yourself struggling to read a book that’s casting off political and scientific and philosophical ideas. I mean you got to read about three pages before the arrow gets out of the quiver. That was a best-seller in 1818. It sold the equivalent of five million copies a book today. It would be an outrageous best seller. It was bought by dirt farmers, and it was read by their kids.

Learn to Draw

Not one of my favorite human beings but the reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is. So, developing the powers of accurate observation, it’s not a natural thing to do. We don’t naturally see what’s in front of us or hear what other people say, either. So, some emphasis on that.

Learn How to Handle Pain

This one is a big one: practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England that it was translated over here it was done not to win a game but to get people familiar with the idea that pain isn’t very painful, unless you think it is. Otherwise, it just goes away.

What you learn from these things is that you do have, I’ll say the God-given internal resources, but these people knew that you had the internal resources to overcome these things, that it was only to the common people that they seemed impossible to do. Once you tried to do them, they were easy to do, or fairly easy as long as you were disciplined. As long as you understood there was danger, as long as you are confident in yourself. Well, you want those things for your children, anyway.

Homeschooling Hope

I’d say, just to swell your heads here, I think that the homeschoolers are the most exciting contradiction of the direction of the 20th century that I’ve ever heard, seen, or read about. That without the slightest bit of assistance you just grab your bootstraps and lifted yourself up and now that you’re you’re substantial enough all over that you can’t be pushed around so easily.