[iaabtpbtpnn]

I have long wondered whether it would be possible to identify the most basic, core words of English, and construct a dictionary such that all definitions eventually reduce to those words. That way, a speaker of a foreign language could learn the meanings of the core words by translation into their native language, and then the process of learning a new word would be: look it up in the dictionary, and if there are any words in the definition that you don't already know, look those up, and so on until everything is reduced to the basic words you already know. The question then is, how many basic words must there be, and which ones are they? I realize nobody actually learns a language like this, but it's still conceptually interesting, analogous to the idealized process of reducing a mathematical proof all the way to the axioms (which, of course, mathematicians don't actually do, but in principle they could).

[fbreton]

This exists : https://learnthesewordsfirst.com/ is a "multi layer dictionary". There are 360 base words, the very first ones are explained with images, then each word is defined using the previous ones. Then there's a list of 2000 more words defined using only base words. The last layer is a full dictionary whose definitions use only these 360+2000 words.

[eximius]

Do you know if this exists for learning other languages? Because this is exactly what I've been looking for as a language learning tool.

[Cro_on]

I was thinking the same thing! I think it in itself should be useful as a starting point for learning many languages, by just translating them literally into the language of choice.

[iaabtpbtpnn]

Very cool, thanks for sharing! I knew I couldn't have been the only person to think of this. :)

[Piskvorrr]

Works well as a learning tool, but fails miserably for translation. The underlying assumption "the mapping between words in a pair of languages is simple" starts falling apart beyond the most basic introductory course.