Discover the best start to learning a language for beginners
If you are a beginner and thinking about learning a new language, you have to start somewhere. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi said: A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. So true.
However, while you cannot determine the length of the journey, you can decide where to start from. For beginners, most systems will start with a series of pictures of familiar objects to learn such as “ball” and “book” or of people such as “nurse” or “teacher” etc. They will then build on these nouns with some relevant verbs such as “to read” (the book) or to “to wait for” (the teacher).
It’s not the best place to start. A few nouns – yes, that’s OK….but the verbs selected are not the best. Ideally you want to firstly learn verbs that will work in nearly all situations. This means your language ability will grow massively, quickly.
Let’s take the verb “to read”. The issue with this verb is that it only works with a select few nouns. You can read a newspaper, a book, a magazine, a kindle….but you can’t read a ball, a nurse or a teacher (or indeed much else). So in 99.99% of the time you will not be able to use the verb “to read”.
Multi-functional Verbs
There are, however, verbs that WILL work in 99.9% of the time. I like to think of these verbs as the Swiss Army Knife of verbs…a multi-tool that you can attach to nouns to express yourself.
Here’s a great multi-functional verb:
“To See”
I see the nurse, I see the ball, I see the teacher, I see the traffic jam, I see your point! So lets learn the verb “to see” ahead of “to read”. I hope you see my point
When I was inventing KLOO, (a game for learning a second language) I discovered that there actually aren’t that many multi-functional verbs – so they are very precious. It also means that you don’t have to learn too many before you have the complete set. It is for this reason that we packed our language games with them….and also why they are recommended language games for beginners as well as intermediate language learners.
Here’s a list of Multi-Functional Verbs to learn first:
To prefer
To want
To adore
To like
To hate
To ask for
To choose
To bring
To look for
To love
To find
To look at
There are some great second league multi-functional verbs too…although not quite as useful s the premier league list above, these are terrific too.
To pay for
To sell
To buy
To refuse
To have
To hold
To take
Learn these and your ability to express yourself quickly and easily will grow exponentially. That’s why it’s a great place for language beginners to start.
At KLOO language games we use ALL these verbs in our games because we know how important they are. Furthermore, each deck you play with has a different theme such as “Eating & Drinking”, “People”, “Clothes” and “Everyday Objects” through which you will learn relevant nouns, adjectives and connectives.
Q. Guess how many sentences you can make with one deck of KLOO – because we use multi-functional verbs. (Hundreds?, Thousands? Tens of thousand? Hundreds of thousands? More? )…see below
A: More…see how many
Have fun learning a new language….see too how easy it is to learn these words using KLOO’s unique Discovery Learning system. Have fun. Learn faster.
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