An Anecdote From Personal Life- The Usefulness of the Learn By the Roots Approach

Like the gimmicky 90's commercials that say "I'm not just a spokesman, I use it myself!", I too am the first "customer" of my Learn by the Roots system. It in fact all started when I started making learner notes for myself in a Google Doc and realized that if I made them neat, and pretty, and gave them a tweak or two*, they would actually work for others too.

With my background in corpus linguistics and creating learning materials (normally for the reverse- teaching English to Ukrainians), I simply changed the editorial standards from self-made notes, to standing resources that other learners could use.

Yesterday I was reading in Ukrainian, for pleasure and practice, and just for fun, I took one page of this book about the development of cities in England during the Middle Ages, and looked at it through a Learn by the Roots lense.

I was quite proud of myself because, a) I knew nearly every word on the page, and b) my Roots knowledge was the reason.

So, take a look- I highlighted every non-native, non-Slavic borrowed word with a pink highlighter.

We won't go heavy on statistics but here's what I found- on this one page of a moderate+ difficulty book, written in Ukrainian originally by a Ukrainian, there were 21 words of foreign origin. That is, loanwords. They are transparent and easy for any English speaker, indeed these are the kind of globally swapped academic words that almost anyone would recognize. Соціальний, економичний, матеріал, династія and so forth. While it'll take you a second to adapt to the grammar, and knowing adjective forms versus noun forms, these come almost for free. While that's great- look what's next.

There are 83 words here that are built entirely from Ukrainian's native Slavic bedrock- that lead only straight back to Indo-European, the mother-language that birthed also English, Latin, Hindi, and so many others. These 83 words do NOT come "almost for free," in fact many are hard to see their relation to anything, until you've been trained for it. That is, of course, what I write the Learn by the Roots series for. To train your eyes. Because most of these, in fact, do have cognates (related words) to the other languages, once you know where to look.

Anyways, I'll keep today's musings brief with some other quick numbers. The 83 words were from only 52 unique roots (that means there were over 31 re-occurences of a root- with either a new prefix, a new suffix, etc). That's no fluke- Ukrainian builds a huge range of expression just by moving around 12 prefixes with these top 500 roots.

By coincidence, this page didn't contain a single Slavic root NOT covered by the full scope (Volume I coming very soon, and Volume II later) of Ukrainian's top 500 roots. That's another thing. My prepwork for writing this book included cataloging actually nearly 800 roots. I cut the ones that were the least productive, that covered an average of 3 key words or less. Not one of them came into play today to read this page, while some roots had 2, 3, and even 4 re-occurences.

For those interested, the same page had a bit over 15 uses/re-uses of proper names, while discussing history.

So, imagine that- to get through this text, about 80% of the words rely on knowledge of Slavic roots. Only approximately 20% could rely on academic-level loanwords. Reading this, you'd roughly know the author was talking about, well, politics, economics, dynasties, you wouldn't actually know a single other thing that was going on until you address the Slavic bedrock- the roughly 80%.

And secondly, those 80% are actually often repeating the same core root. Learn those roots and texts like these basically go from densely unreadable walls of intimidating material where you're barely holding on to 20%, to things you will comprehend 95-100% of.

By the way, the book in question (all rights reserved to them of course,) is Повсякденне Життя Міст Англії XI-XIII Ст. by Олександр Охріменко- Everyday Life of the Cities of England of the 11th-13th Centuries.

*and exhaustively researched them, expanded them, and triple checked them :)