[tom_mellior]

Several people are writing this. May I ask why? I just don't understand the use case. If you want a list of basic words, take the 60 basic English words and look them up in a French dictionary. But more generally, can't you just look up anything you want in a dictionary?

[nicky0]

The use case would be for the teaching and learning of French. Just as this website is for the learning of English.

Yes, we can all look up a few words in the dictionary.

[tom_mellior]

To be honest, I think this website is more about the intellectual challenge of constructing the layered dictionary than about actually providing a learning resource. But that is again because I don't see the point of using this for learning. I'd be interested in someone's concrete thoughts about how/why to use this.

To take an example from elsewhere in this thread, if I encounter the word "gauche" in a French text, I could just look it up in a normal dictionary, or I could look it up in a French multi-layered one and invest some effort into deciphering a French paragraph saying the equivalent of "X is on this side of your body: Most people do not write using the hand they have on this side of their body. They write using their other hand."

Sure you can learn such basic terms this way. But why would it be better?

[nicky0]

I think the idea is that you would actually study this as a set of lessons to build up the initial vocabulary in a new language for describing things, rather than use it as a word reference.