people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

Citation very much needed

No it’s not. Just take some language classes and take your own survey. It’s trivially verified.

It’s quite rare for a language class to use one language to learn another. Every single person I have surveyed believes (without evidence) that it’s better to learn a language without exploiting your mother tongue to learn a new language. Many language teachers are themselves instructed to avoid using the student’s mother tongue.

This guy’s full of shit. 6000 words is what, ~B1-B2 level of fluency?

zaphod answered this well but I should add that 6k words are my count (from a dictionary), not the person who gave the tip. No one claimed that 6000 nouns results in “fluency”. (I scare-quoted fluency because B1 is where I’m at in French and I am nowhere near fluent; and I doubt B2 would get me there).

IIRC, “this guy” is Thomas Michael, a brit who produced audio tapes that teach French to English speakers. So there’s your source if you want to chase it up.

Does anyone else think Thomas Michael is full of shit?

While it’s a neat idea, there are a lot of words in French that resemble English words but don’t mean exactly the same.

Of course the AI bot would have to work that out and avoid such cases.

There’s some kind of tech defect going on here. When I posted my comment, this thread and all others w/the same title had zero comments. Now I see many comments in here, some of which are older than my own. So in my view of this community, it appeared like a ghost town with a bot making a bunch of empty threads. Apparently posting in this thread triggered the node I am on to fetch the comments.

I don’t get what’s going on with all these threads. You seem to be spamming your own community. All these threads with this same title do not link anywhere or have any content. It’s drowning out meaningful threads.