6 Prototypical Sentences Needed to Parse a New Language

Here are 6 sentences. These basic sentences incorporate a wide variety of grammatical structures, such as possessives, indirect objects, gender, adjectives, subject-verb agreement, and so on. A lot of information is conveyed by such simple words as "to" and "it". They may seem quite simple and uninspiring in English, but ask yourself if you can express these sentences in Spanish or Japanese (etc.).

If you can express these in your target language accurately, you are certainly ahead of the game in language learning. You have established a good base level of grammatical understanding. This one of our main goals at AHS in Year 1 and Year 2 of World Language classes.

1. The apple is red.
2. It is John’s apple.
3. I give John the apple.
4. We give him the apple.
5. He gives it to John.
6. She gives it to him.

Using prototypical sentences you can greatly accelerate your language learning. Read more on this on Tim Ferris' 4-Hour Work Week: How to Learn But Not Master Any Language in 1 Hour

Two Bonus Sentences to Try Out -- These are litmus tests for Auxiliary Verbs (like to be and to have) in the target language:

• I must give it to him.
• I want to give it to her.

Can you translate these as well?

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Additional Resources:

• How do you become fluent in 11 languages? (Amazing video)
• 7 Types of Sentence Fragments and How to Use Them (Multi-language grammar guide)