Learn These Words First

Here is what is bad about most books that explain words: the words they use to explain are harder than the words they explain. There is a book with a different plan.

It starts with about four hundred first words. It shows you these with pictures and very small sentences, in lessons, and after each lesson it asks you questions, to see if you know the words now. It does not use one word it has not shown you before. Then, using only the first words, it explains two thousand more. And with the two thousand, another, much bigger book explains all the words there are — about seven times ten thousand of them. All the words, growing from one small seed: the first words.

The man and the woman

The first sentence in the book — the sentence at the bottom of all the others — is about a man and a woman. The man sees the woman. That is all that happens. The man and the woman have names, but their names are not first words, and the book you are reading now is not allowed to say them. Lesson after lesson, the man and the woman see things, give each other things, eat, sleep, fall, laugh, and learn — and you learn with them.

The word from lesson two

In lesson two, the man says a sentence that no one in the book could say before: I see her. It has a word in it that no sentence before it has had: I — the word for the one who is saying the words. The first sentence in the book and this sentence say the same thing. But the first one is someone else's sentence about him. This one is his.

A short time after that, the man and the woman can say my and am: This is my hand. I am here. Small words — and all the things a person will say about their own days are made from them.

The book you are reading now had not used the word I before this lesson's sentence. It was held back for a good place.

Its words for words

The book has its own words for kinds of words: a word for a thing is a noun, and a word for doing is a verb. These two words are first words as well — the book needs them to explain all the others.

Where it lives

A man made this book and put it on the strings between the number machines, where all people can read it for no money. All the words in the book you are reading now were taken from that book's first lessons. If you learn its first lessons, you can read all of this book, to its end.

That is why this book is made from small words. They are not small. They are first.