Planned Russian as a teaching tool

BYSTROV, DMITRY MIKHAILOVICH, lead engineer-programmer
Ryazan design bureau Globus, Ryazan, Russia

PLANNED RUSSIAN AS A TEACHING TOOL

I propose a standard for text adaptation - the first level of
fixation for Russian as a foreigh language. The standart
includes less than 400 morphemes. It has been tested on an
adaptation of Pavel Shumil's text Cat's House (~40KB, topics:
philosophy of science, computing, medicine, zoology, cooking,
contains dialogues and verses).
Keywords: Russian, Russian as a foreign language, school,
teaching, standard.

Introduction

According to myVocab, Russian natives at the end of the school
know 51 000 words in average [Головин Г. В. Словарный запас
носителей русского языка (2014). / myVocab.
https://www.myvocab.info/articles/slovarniy-zapas-nositeley-russ
kogo-yazyka-vliyanie-vozrasta-i-obrazovaniya]. The published
literature leans on this vocabulary. However, the specifics of
teaching the foreigh languages in school (including Russian as a
foreigh language, RFL) allows to give just a couple thousands
words in a course of several years. So, this literature is
inaccessible for the foreigners who learned RFL. (slide: RFL,
level B1 (460 academic hours) - 2312 words)
Currently there are no accepted standards of planned Russian
(PR) for the adaptation of Russian language literature and
composing the educational explanatory dictionaries. For English,
there are such standards: Basic English (850 words) [Ogden, C.
K. The Basic Books // Supplement to The Basic News, January,

1938. Cambridge: The Orthological Institute. (electronic
      version) http://ogden.basic-english.org/basic_books.html],
      AECMA/ASD Simplified English (1500 words) [SIMPLIFIED TECHNICAL
      ENGLISH. Specification ASD-STE100. European Community Trade Mark
      No. 004901195. International specification for the preparation
      of technical documentation in a controlled language. ISSUE 7,
      JANUARY 2017.
      https://robertobertuol.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ASD-STE100
      -ISSUE-7.pdf], Oxford 3000 (3000 words) [Oxford 3000. / Oxford
      Learner's Dictionaries.
      https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/external/pdf/wordlist
      s/oxford-3000-5000/The_Oxford_3000.pdf], Oxford 5000 (5000 слов)
      [Oxford 5000. / Oxford Learner's Dictionaries.
      https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/external/pdf/wordlist
      s/oxford-3000-5000/The_Oxford_5000.pdf] (slide: first Harry
      Potter book - 5920 words, all 7 books contain 21495 words)
      (English itself is not poor: a 20-year old American English
      native knows 42 000 lemmas in average [Brysbaert, M., Stevens,
      M., Mandera, P., Keuleers, E. How Many Words Do We Know?
      Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word
      Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participants
      Age. / Front. Psychol.7:1116, 2016.
      https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389
      /fpsyg.2016.01116/full]). Basic English standard is used for
      early fixation, Simplified English - for technical
      documentation, and Oxford 3000 - for the explanatory part of
      Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, for which there is no
      Russian counterpart. Namely, according to my counts, in
      Ozhegov's dictionary [Ожегов С. И. Толковый словарь русского
      языка: 72500 слов и 7500 фразеологических выражений / С. И.
      Ожегов, Н. Ю. Шведова. - М. : Азъ, 1992. - 960 с.], 24465
      word-forms are used in the explanatory part at least twice,
      15287 - at least 3 times, 11019 - at least 4 times. These
      numbers by far exceed 3000 words and the possibilities of the
      school programme.
      The purpose of the current study - increasing the efficiency of
      teaching Russian as a foreign language by means of early
      fixation. The fixation should be done with: 1) possibility of
      reading of adapted literature about many topics, 2) possibility
      of using an explanatory dictionary instead of a bilingual one.

Procedure

The adaptation of text has in mind that a reader can understand
most of words and the overall meaning of phrases using the
information he already knows. The rest of the words might be
guessed by context or explained in comments. If the limit is
several comments per page, then 95% coverage of the text with
known vocabulary is enough, and this vocabulary would be the
basic level of PR.
In the case of modern literary Russian the most frequent 750
words comprise around 80% of text, the most frequent 1750 words

• around 89%, and the most frequent 6750 - around 95% [Толковый
  словарь русского языка: Ок. 7000 словар. ст.: Свыше 35000
  значений: Более 70000 иллюстрат. примеров / Под ред. Д. В.
  Дмитриева. - М.: ООО Издательство Астрель: ООО Издательство АСТ,
  2003. • 1582, [2] с. - С. 13-14.]. Worth to mention that many of
          these words have the same roots, and many others have synonyms
          formed from other used bases with some known prefixes and
          suffixes. Such replacements can optimize the studied data.
          In the present study, I use Sharov's word frequency dictionary
          containing 32617 lemmas [Шаров, С. А. Частотный словарь русского
          языка. / Словород.
          https://www.slovorod.ru/freq-sharov/_zip/35000rus.zip] as a
          source for the words.
          The sufficient set of action words is crucial for the coverage
          of random topics. Because of that, in the beginning I extracted
          all the verbs from the dictionary, sorted them by roots, and
          arranged these roots in three sets: Slavic, borrowed, and
          onomatopoetic. Then I split all of these in unreplaceable and
          replaceable (showing the replacement). I also extracted the
          common prefixes and suffixes.
          After that, I processed the first 5000 lemmas in Sharov's
          dictionary and partially - the next 5000. All the words were
          sorted by roots. Completely replaceable roots were moved into a
          separate list with the replacements shown (adaptation
          dictionary, intended to be the core of future explanatory
          dictionary). Between the possible synonyms, the words with the
          simplest declension or conjugation were preferred.

Results

After several runs of optimization I could found full coverage
of the first 5000 words with the following parts:

• 392 morphemes to learn: 102 actions (verb roots) + 65
  qualifiers (learned as the bases of adjectives) + 125
  appelatives (nouns) + 100 service morphemes (prefixes, suffixes,
  pronouns, conjunctions etc.).
• 98 morphemes that are possible not to learn: 54 international
  terms (атом, база, бот, бутыль, генерал, доктор, дом, журнал,
  инструмент, кабина, карта, квадрат, кот, кофе, куб, легион,
  линия, луна, мама, материал, машина, мёд, медицина, металл,
  минута, миссия, море, муха, мышь, музыка, нос, овца, океан,
  пальто, папа, планета, проба, продукт, ракета, резина, рис,
  риск, роза, свинья, секрет, система, соль, тема, телефон,
  техника, труба, химия, царь, энергия) + 12 terms written with
  signs (°, g, kg, $, %, m, km, cm, №, +Р, s, t) + 21 numerals +
  11 geographical names, randomly appeared in the first 5000
  lemmas of Sharov's dictionary.
  The most of the following 5000 lemmas appear to be replaceable
  with already known morphemes, and а considerable portion of the
  rest are international. Thus the basic level of PR can cover
  over 95% of text about any topics, except the specialized.
  As an example, I adaptated Pavel Shumil's text Cat's House
  (~40KB, topics: philosophy of science, computing, medicine,
  zoology, cooking, contains dialogues and verses). Worth to
  mention, that the resulting test does not look like Esperanto,
  it is still Russian, but with an unusual choice of words. The
  working materials, such as this text, the lists of
  words/morphemes, and the additional data are downloadable at my
  website: [Быстров, Д. М. Рабочие материалы по плановому русскому
  языку. / Nedopc.com.
  http://alonecoder.nedopc.com/ling/PIE/index.html].
  392 morphemes might be learned in the course of one semester,
  with the moderate speed of 10 morphemes per lesson. Also,
  although the grammar of literary Russian is very complex, in the
  case of PR all the learned morphemes together with the used
  declension, conjugation, and stress paradigms fit in one
  fly-leaf (see the working materials). This fly-leaf might be
  included in every adapted book.
  The education can proceed as follows:
• from the reading we go to writing: learn the grammar rules,
  skipped at the first stage. After the reading, these rules will
  be easier to understand;
• expand the list of terms (in the basic level, many terms were
  replaced by descriptions). It will be possible to read
  newspapers. An explanatory dictionary might be based at this
  stage;
• learn the spoken Russian according to the real usage. It will
  be possible to watch TV;
• learn the secondary meanings, emotional markings etc. It will
  be possible to read the ordinary books.
  This way the student proceeds to modern literary Russian when he
  already can read Russian. With other methods (i. e. learn words
  by some unadapted book or by the frequency list) a student must
  learn 6750 words to achieve the same level of understanding
  [Толковый словарь русского языка: Ок. 7000 словар. ст.: Свыше
  35000 значений: Более 70000 иллюстрат. примеров / Под ред. Д. В.
  Дмитриева. - М.: ООО Издательство Астрель: ООО Издательство АСТ,
  2003. • 1582, [2] с. - С. 13-14.], that is hardly possible for
          every student. This problem cannot even be solved by the
          morphemic dictionary of literary Russian: it contains over 4400
          roots, 70 prefixes, and around 500 suffixes, between whose there
          are a number of anomal ones, used only in several words
          [Кузнецова, А. И., Ефремова, Т. Ф. Словарь морфем русского
          языка. Около 52 000 слов. М.: "Русский язык", 1986. - 1135 с. -
          С. 16.].

Conclusions

My results show that the number of people capable of learning
Russian as a foreign language can be significantly extended,
because in the case of Russian, one semester is enough for going
from zero level to reading texts about random topics. This
possibility was not considered in the previous research.
What is needed for practice:

• grammar of PR;
• second level of PR (expanded at least twice as compared to the
  basic level, to include many terms which are needed for an
  explanatory dictionary);
• explanatory dictionary, where literary Russian words are
  explained with PR;
• a dictionary for adaptation from literary Russian to the basic
  and the second levels of PR;
• adapted books (for every level of PR);
• PR class-book in Russian (based on PR);
• PR class-books in other international languages;
• test place for teaching.
  To make these, it is needed to form a workgroup.