Learn just enough words and concepts and grammatical rules to get by in a foreign language, and also bootstrap further learning.

The words are selected loosely based on the theory of epistemic levels with the rationale being that "high level" concepts, being less general, are less useful than low-level, general concepts.

For instance, "push" and "pull" are elementary notions, while "sculpt" is a more nuanced, more specific, high level concept. Likewise, "fall" is lower level, while "slip" is higher level.

The guiding principle is that the number of words increases exponentially with level, while the usefulness of each word decreases. In principle it should be possible to define an ordering on words and phrases in a language in terms of "level," which should correspond to decreasing usefulness in spoken interactions.

Additionally, in order to bootstrap learning, general questions like "what do you call this in <language>?" or "how do you say <gesture/point/mime> in <language>?" are also included, to leverage the knowledge of others who are in a position to teach you.

• Grammatical rules, tenses, hypotheticals which provide a "mapping" between source language and destination language
• Examples
• Pronunciation
• All possible variations of example sentences (e.g. by tense, person, gender)

In ancient times, how did people conduct business, trade, and friendship across the language barrier when learning resources were perhaps hard to come by? This was the question that came up in conversation a little while back with @jairtrejo. He suggested that maybe people didn't typically know other languages in detail; that they knew "just enough" to get by with the essentials.

It could be said that not much has really changed as far as language is concerned. While widely spoken languages are perhaps more common now, we still often interact across the linguistic divide, and many of us are too lazy to spend a lot of time learning even with a wealth of available resources, and when travel time is upon us we struggle hopelessly to say what we mean and vow that next time will be different, that we'll learn the language for sure upon returning home. And of course, rarely follow through.

What if you could spend your time learning a language in such a way that you gain the maximum proficiency for the minimum amount of time spent? That's the premise here. It's not that you get something for free, but rather, that you spend your time learning precisely the most useful things at each stage. That way, you don't waste time learning how to say "elegant" in a foreign language when you're much more likely to grasp for the word for "pretty."

In principle, every new thing you learn in the language would be the most useful thing you don't already know.

For now it's just an idea and a word list and some example sentences. But it would be nice to leverage the content into a usable tool at some point. In any case, hope you find this useful! Contributions welcome.

All content is "part of the world." You are free to do whatever you like with it and it isn't owned by anybody (not even the creators). Attribution would be appreciated and would help, but it is not strictly necessary nor required. If you'd like to learn more about this way of doing things and how it could lead to a peaceful, efficient, and creative world (and how you can be involved), visit drym.org.